Google Wave is now an Apache Project

Google’s proposal to Apache, the former company stated its goals were to migrate Wave’s codebase from Google to ASF’s infrastructure

It’s official: Google Wave is now Apache Wave.

A couple weeks ago, Google made a proposal to the Apache Software Foundation to take the reins on Wave. Wave, which only launched to the public in 2009, saw lackluster adoption; Google officially halted development in August and open-sourced the code in September.

In Google’s proposal to Apache, the former company stated its goals were to migrate Wave’s codebase from Google to ASF’s infrastructure, to get Wave back to a state of active development and to bring new committers into the project. The proposal also noted that Wave still had some big-name users, including the U.S. Navy.

Apache has now accepted that proposal, and Google is preparing for a few changes.

Googler Alex North wrote on the company blog, “We’re spinning up the project infrastructure so that the community can continue to grow in the Apache way.”

North also mentioned that several new, non-Google committers are coming to the Wave project; other contributors are welcome to the project, as well.

We look forward to seeing how Wave evolves as an Apache project; becoming an open-source, community-driven project is probably the best thing that could have happened to Wave as a large-scale, ambitious web app — much better than the deadpool.