To paraphrase Mark Twain, it appears that rumors of Google Wave’s death may be greatly exaggerated. Google announced that it was ending development on the project back in August. But some of Google Wave’s developers have submitted the code for what’s now known as Wave in a Box (WIAB) to the Apache Software Foundation.
The project will now be a candidate to become a Podling in the Apache Incubator, the first step in becoming one of Apache’s open-source projects.
Google Wave was introduced in 2009 as a distributed, real-time communication and communication platform. But, citing low user adoption, Google ended the project earlier this year. Google has made moves towards packaging Wave in a Box so that developers can have standalone functionality of Waves and can run them on their own servers.
Many of Wave’s components are open source, so others can and do continue to work on the project. According to the Apache Incubator proposal, “We anticipate early future committers coming from places like Novell, SAP, companies related to the US Navy’s usage of wave, startups in the wave ecosystem, and many independent individuals.”
The initial goals of the WIAB project include migrating the codebase from code.google.com to the ASF infrastructure and then continuing the project’s development and growth of its developer community. ComputerWorld cites Dan Peterson, one of the developers on the project, as indicating that a vote from the Apache Software Foundation on whether Wave in a Box will become an Apache Incubator Project may come as early as next week.
