Having worked on a similar endeavor, I doubt they intentionally dragged their feet on it. They likely had a smorgasbord of legal bullshit and technical challenges resulting from code omissions mandated by said legal bullshit that they had to muddle through.
I don't care. Don't promise to do something like that if you can't follow through. Nobody forced them to promise to open source Pocket (although that promise certainly helped the bad PR of integrating a closed source service into Firefox!).
You should care. Not holding a promise because you cannot or because you don’t want to is not the same thing. Both aren’t great but there’s a very significant ethical difference between the two in my opinion.
How common is it for a SaaS company that isn't an old-enterprisey type to use third-party proprietary code in their business logic? I associated that phenomenon much more with standard installable PC software, especially the type to use specialized workflows for non-standard stuff, not a web service, much less something like this.
