[Foundation-l] Google Wave and Wikimedia projects

[Judson Dunn]

On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 9:26 PM, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> 2009/5/29 Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com>:
>> Probably, some of you already saw that Google made something for which
>> I think that it will be the new form of the mainstream Internet
>> perception. You may read Slashdot article [1], a good description at
>> the blog "Google Operating System" [2] (not officially connected with
>> Google) and, of course, you may see the official site with more than
>> one hour of presentation [3].
>
> I've watched pieces of the presentation, but not the whole thing. Is
> it clear at this point exactly how free/open the entire stack is going
> to be? I.e. will it have dependencies on proprietary services to work
> or work well?
>

The protocol is completely open, and published: http://www.waveprotocol.org/

Their wave client is going to be opened, and will server as the
reference implementation. My real guess is they open source a
reference implementation that works, but isn't their actual client.
Some people on twitter and in the wave protocol mailing list have been
saying that their client is very dependent on google server structure,
and needs to be normalized before it's open sourced. I don't think
this is a big deal though. gmail isn't open source, but thunderbird
is, and they can send and receive email to each other. If google is
going to make an open source client that people can look at and start
from also, great. (this is just a guess, they may open source their
actual server side version, but i really can't see that...)

The Extensions, and robots and gadgets api is open, BUT 3rd party
developers don't have to open source their work. So, some of the
things they showed like the maps gadget, and the spellcheck are what
they are calling internal extensions. They have a lot of these up
already with source code
http://code.google.com/apis/wave/samples/index.html but I certainly
wouldn't expect all 3rd party people to do this (facebook extension
etc)

Judson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cohesion