Unfortunately and it's sad but don't believe in this for a minute.

Oh for crying out loud, just use Feedly already. It's a perfect replacement once you switch to the headline mode. It's even better in some ways I think (the feed search and recommendations).

Really the Reader "Web App" - is not that exiting. Cloning it is only a matter of a few days work.

The interesting bit is the 'backend', the crawler and database, ie the servers that supplies the API. But that simply can't be open-sourced, as it too Google centric.

I just used TT-RSS for the backend, and built my own GReader like front end in a matter of ours.

My guess is that it uses too much of Google's core infrastructure for them to open source ... so the answer is probably going to be "No" no matter how many people sign.

I wanted to type this exactly.

Yeah. Maybe they can't open source the underlying APIs on the backend, but the webapp as such, they could do. That will be great.

Encouraging to open source _and migrate_ (not neglect and kill) Google Reader is very important.