Google Wave open source next steps: "Wave in a Box"

I wish they'd done this from the beginning.

They talked about Wave being an open protocol and that anyone would be able to write Wave servers and clients. Yet when it came down to it, they released a bare-bones client implementation. All the while they continued to hack on their Wave server and adding proprietary features to their fork of the client. So it never really became as open a project as they had promised.

Day after day it became more of "just another Google project."

It was no surprise to me that interest waned. Their interface was pretty complicated, hardly anyone had accounts, and all of the data was hosted at Google instead of being spread out amongst various providers as email is (and Wave promised).

I still think Wave is a great protocol/server/client. I hope much will be done with it by the open-source community.

I was very much hoping for something like this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1575928 and I'm really happy they chose to open source it rather than to let it rust on a shelf somewhere.

I really hope this includes all of the code needed to do Operational Transforms. I've got a single user application that I'd like to make multi-user, but OT is the correct way to do it and I've been dreading implementing it. I suspect rewriting this to use my backend and frontend would probably be easier than writing that middle layer.

I just blogged about this. Early this year I played around with the open source code on the Wave protocol site, but "play" is the active word here: I did nothing practical with it.

Although I never used Wave's web UI very much, I did find writing Wave robots interesting and potentially very useful.

I was disappointed when Google recently announced their phasing out support of Wave but today's announcement that they are completing the open source project to the point of its being a complete system is very good news.

Why aren't they rewriting something similar to Wave instead of just OSSing Wave as-is? Is there secret sauce that they want to sit on for some reason?

This is pretty impressive, or at least, shows they really have no interest in shipping this as a standalone product, not now, or ever.

It will be interesting to see if anyone can take what's there and wrap a better product around it.

It's be great if something like this became part of the expected install for a new server. Web Server, dB, scripting engine, framework, blog, Wave, etc.

yay, i really like wave (aside from giving my data to google) but i really couldn't get anyone to use it with me no matter how well it fitted the project.

Also ~> http://pygowave.net/

Thank you!

Hold up, did Google just make a roundabout dick joke?