Google Wave will live on as open source code

It appears rumors of Google Wave's demise might have been slightly exaggerated.

After Google announced recently that it was mothballing Wave, that appeared to mark the end of the enterprise social networking experiment. (We wrote about in One on one with Dan Keldsen on the demise of Google Wave.) Last week Google announced in its Google Wave Developer blog that Wave would live on as "Wave in a box," an open source tool box for developers who want to develop applications based on the existing code base.

Google says there are over 200,000 lines of existing code. The "box" will provide a way for anyone who might be so inclined to take the initial work Google has done on Wave and the Wave Federation protocol and expand upon it. In fact, Google will do some additional work before releasing all of the code to developers as open source.

Alex North, a software engineer on the Google Wave team wrote:

"We will expand upon the 200K lines of code we've already open sourced [detailed at waveprotocol.org] to flesh out the existing example Wave server and web client into a more complete application or 'Wave in a Box.'"

North admits it won't resemble Google Wave as we know it, but Google hopes that developers--which North said reacted positively to the initial Wave release--will take it the rest of the way without much support from Google going forward.

I'm not sure how realistic this is, but it is probably better than relegating it to the dustbin of failed Google projects, and perhaps some enterprising developer might create something interesting from it.

For more information:
- check out Alex North's blog post on the Google Developer Blog