Google Wave was called a lot of things - innovative, ambitious and maybe even ahead of its time. Unfortunately, it could never be called successful, which is why the search-giant announced that it would be pulling the plug before the end of this year.
However, the collaborative platform had managed to build a small but very dedicated fan base during its short life. This band of loyal followers even petitioned Google to transfer Wave to the Apache Software Foundation's Incubator programme, and today it was announced that the proposal had been accepted.
On the official Wave developer blog, Googler Alex North revealed that the framework had been transferred over to the foundation so that it could live on as an open-source project. He explained that "it became quite clear that there is a healthy community of startups, independent developers, and industry partners enthusiastic to continue development of the Wave Federation protocols and Wave in a Box product".
As a result, the code would be handed over "so that the community can continue to grow in the Apache way."
The platform - which will now be known as Apache Wave - has already attracted a number of committers from outside of Google to help to drive the development, who will be joined by a few of the company's own developers.
The Wave framework was designed to allow multiple users to collaborate on documents and projects in real-time and combined features of an e-mail, instant messaging and social networking. Following its launch in late 2009, the platform failed to attract the sort of public interest that Google had been hoping for, and so the decision to cease development of Wave as a standalone product was made in August this year. However, several of the underlying technologies were integrated back into the company's other products.
