Most sources a few weeks ago suggested that Google Wave was a goner; even me, your humble DigiLounge co-founder. However, in an unexpected turn of events,  Google has made a pair of big announcements about the service. Yesterday, Google’s Alex North published a blog post which indicates that something different is going on.

In other words, Wave is not so much dead, as preparing to enter the second chapter of its saga. To that end, Google will be open sourcing additional code (more than 200k lines already open). This does not mean the  project is going OSS as lots of people have been predicting. I like to think of it as the Chromium/Chrome model: while the majority is open, there are particular items which Google can’t (e.g. codecs) and others they simply don’t make part of the open source code.

They’re also, interestingly, working on delivering “Wave-in-a-box”, which would include a server and web client that developers and administrators could self-deploy and manage.

So, this post can be a moral for us all: do NOT count Wave out just yet.

It’s time for Round Two! And its code will no doubt be cropping up in other apps.