I feel the need to amend my position somewhat. After I wrote my message to the list I watched the Wave demo video <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ> (I had put off watching the video for months since it is 1h20m long), and more than once the presenter says that Google will open source most of the code. He even gives a specific example of ACME Corp. taking Google's Wave client+server code, modifying it, and hosting it on their own server. Note that Google's "client" is written with GWT, which means part of it runs in the browser and part runs on a server; both parts are necessary. (The video also shows a "hacker" Wave client with a curses interface, but I think this was mostly intended as a joke.)
The situation as I see it is that Wave is useless without a client and writing a client is a lot of work, but Google has promised to release their client code. I won't consider Wave to be "open" until Google releases their client code (or someone builds an independent, fully functional client, which I consider unlikely). I don't really care about the client-server protocol given that different types of clients (Web vs. native) will want to talk to the server in different ways (mostly due to crippled networking support in browsers). If both sides are open, I don't much care if it's based on serialized dead rodents over Comet. If people agree with this analysis I'll write it up into a blog post. Wes Felter _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.autonomo.us http://lists.autonomo.us/mailman/listinfo/discuss
