[Foundation-l] Google Wave and Wikimedia projects

[Milos Rancic]

On Sat, May 30, 2009 at 7:13 AM, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> It's not free software. The blog post says they "intend to open source
> the code". That generally means the code quality is so bad that they'd
> be embarrassed to make it public, and would like to clean it up to the
> point where humans can understand it, but currently they have more
> important development priorities and no schedule to do such a thing.

This is why that (very long) presentation is important. They clearly
said that they want to make their implementation as the referent open
source implementation.

> Yeah, sure. Like the way Jabber killed proprietary protocols like MSN
> and AIM, right? It's been 9 years since the first release now.

This is a completely other path. As I said, I thought that the
development of something almost identical to the Wave would be much
slower. However, at this point, there is one large corporation behind
it and it is not partially, like they are behind XMPP with their
Gtalk.

> The proprietary IM networks will steal the best ideas from Wave and
> add their own bit of marketing spin, which somehow, to the hoards of
> faithful users, will seem even cooler than what Google Wave can do.
> That's assuming they even perceive a threat.

Yes, this is potential problem.

> Anyway, I'm putting two years from today into my calendar. We'll see
> then whether Wave has taken over the world. I'll post a followup.

:)

> You're assuming that they'll be easier to implement using Wave than
> just starting from scratch. Note that their widget things are HTML,
> and browsers already have rich text editors. An interactive editor
> targeting Wave would be quite similar to an interactive editor
> targeting the browser.

Actually, they did everything with their web toolkit. And, as they
said, all of the code pieces will be free. They explained that you
would be able to make your own implementation based on their code.
Hm... Find one hour and take a look into the presentation. It would be
better than my tries to explain it to you.

> Browsers are something Microsoft actually supports and packages with
> their OS, unlike federated, open-protocol IM clients, which as we've
> seen over the past 9 years, they are not interested in. They've even
> discontinued their IRC client.

There will be web interface, too.