Since the announcement that we will discontinue development of Google Wave as a standalone product, many people have asked us about the future of the open source code and Wave federation protocol. After spending some time on figuring out our next steps, we'd like to share the plan for our contributions over the coming months.

As it strives to replace email, Google has open sourced two chunks of its new-age communications platform, Google Wave. Unveiled to a standing coder ovation at the Google I/O developer conference in late May, Google Wave is a (still-gestating) web platform that crossbreeds email with IM and document sharing, exhibiting a particular talent for near real-time interaction.

What would e-mail look like if it were invented today, rather than several years ago? Meet Google Wave, a preview application shown off Thursday at the Google I/O conference...What is Google Wave? Think of an open-source version of Gmail constructed via instant messaging.

As you may know I was quite keen on the ideas and potential of Google’s Wave project and like many thought it a bit of a shame when they closed the project. ... Google said the project would live on but details were scratchy.

I got this in my Gmail inbox the other day: "Thank you for signing up to give us early feedback on Google Wave. We're happy to give you access to Google Wave and are enlisting your help to improve the product". Since I'm all about making improvements, I clicked the link to accept my invitation to Google Wave.

Community interest in continuing the development of Google's Wave communication platform has led to a proposal to migrate portions of the code base to the Apache Software Foundation (OSM).
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Google developers are giving out about 40,000 lines of Java code for two components of the Google Wave browser software.

"I received an email this morning from a friend who is planning to put his open source project in Google Code, the open source repository hosted by Google..."

Google's developers clearly missed all the Halloween fun, with both the Chrome and Wave teams slinging out updates yesterday. The Wave team has pushed out a "developer instance" of the messaging everything platform.