Google Wave Becomes Apache Wave

While Google is distancing itself from Wave, the project is far from dead. The Apache Software Foundation has now accepted to take the project under its tutelage. Google Wave will become apart of the Apache Incubator program, the first stage in becoming a fully supported project.

"One of the best outcomes from November's Wave Protocol Summit was a proposal for Wave to enter the Apache Software Foundation's incubator program," Alex North, Software Engineer on the Google Wave team, wrote.

"Apache has a fantastic reputation for fostering healthy open source communities that create great software. Last week, that proposal was accepted, and we're spinning up the project infrastructure so that the community can continue to grow in the Apache way," he announced.

Google announced a few months ago that it will be ceasing all development on Wave, the project which had only been made available to the public a couple of months prior.

Low user adoption and lack of traction prompted Google to drop all future work on Wave. However, the project enjoyed a strong community and work was started on Wave in a Box which would enable third-parties to run stand-alone Wave servers.

Parts of Google Wave and the Wave Federation Protocol were already open-source. Even though development of Wave was officially over, Google devoted some resources to creating a code base which would be sufficient for the Wave project to continue on its own.

Apache Wave is set to take over development of both the Federation Protocol as well as the Wave server and client software. The first step is migrating the development environment from Google to Apache's infrastructure.

A number of outside developers are already very involved with Wave and Google is announcing that several key people, all from outside the company, are now part of the Wave project's leadership. They are Tad Glines, Michael McFadden (Solute), James Purser, Ian Roughley (Novell), Anthony Watkins (SESI) and Torben Weis (University Duisburg-Essen) which join former Google interns Joseph Gentle and Lennard de Rijk.