Hi Jochen

In our current implementation, the server does normally not echo
> transformed operations back to a client. Under some failure
> conditions, however, this can happen.
>

In FedOne and even WaveSandBox the server will ALWAYS ECHO BACK deltas sent
by a client (either transformed or the original). I see the messages in
QWaveClient debug output every day.

I think we have a very general non-technical problem here. The Googlers are
often talking about software that we do not have access to (at least yet).
Thus, whatever you say does not make much difference currently, because
FedOne and WaveSandBox-federation is all we have and it is all we can see.
This can easily lead to misunderstandings, because things you consider done
are still open issues in our view.

In most wave presentations, Google asks for the help of the community.
However, this turns out to be a bit difficult currently. As an open source
wave developer I have three options:

a) Remain compatible to FedOne. This is troublesome because the C/S protocol
(for example) has some issues. I just have to live with it. Furthermore, I
invest time in implementing a protocol which will eventually be replaced by
something much better, but nobody can predict when.
b) Improve things. After implementing a client and a basic server I have
gained enough experience to address the issues mentioned in point a).
 However, these improvements will only turn out to become incompatibilities
as long as Google's implementation will be the reference implementation. My
implementation effort will be lost. If (rather unlikely) some independent
open source implementation will become more popular than a Google-driven
implementation, we would split the community in open-source-compatible and
Google-compatible. Both options are not desirable.
c) Wait until Google releases more code. I think we love wave technology too
much to simply sit there for weeks doing no coding.

There is no optimal solution currently. I have spent many years as an active
open source developer (KDE/Qt, KOffice, KHtml/Kfm/Konqueror). One thing I
learned is that stalling an open source effort will either kill it (people
loose interest, go somewhere else) or result in a fork (see Qt<->Harmony and
KDE<->Gnome, KHtml<->WebKit). I feel that the current situation is close to
stalling. FedOne is moving slowly (due to the resources available at Google)
and it is google-owned code. It is not a community owned code base.
QWaveClient and my C++ server are community code, but as long as Google is
the reference, these efforts will eventually stall with FedOne, too (see
point b above).

I think the best we can do is to hope for a quick release of Google's code,
as this will improve the communication and ensure that implementations are
not invalidated because they support some old "standards".

Greetings
Torben

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