Wavers, It has become clear that there a MANY more people are interested in Wave that we had previously thought. There recent explosion of interest is fantastic. However, what I am seeing is that the wave community is splintered and fragmented. There are a lot of people who have been doing development work on wave related concepts like OT, federation, etc outside of Apache Wave. Maybe they thought they were not welcome. Maybe they though the existing code base was headed in the wrong direction. Maybe they thought we would not be open to their project ideas. Who knows. Whatever the reason, there have been many side projects all over the web some how related to wave. Either inspired by wave, or developed to explore some alternative to the way wave did something.
I would like to try to unite these efforts in to one umbrella project. From a code base perspective, we can create multiple folders in our repository were proof of concepts and side projects can exist along side WiaB. If this drives activity and interest to Apache Wave, then fantastic. Sure we would love to have 20 people jump in and help us with the current issues directly in WiaB. If people want to do that, by all means PLEASE HELP. But if that is not what you are interested in, but you ARE interested in some other path forward, please join our community. Please use Apache Wave as your home to develop Wave technology. Be it OT, Clients, Protocols, what have you. There is nothing that says the WiaB in its current form has to be the only product produced by this project. We could have a generic core OT Engine / API that powers wave. We could have the core server that leverages this engine. We could have multiple clients, etc. I specifically named the project Apache Wave and not Apache Wave in a Box, because the vision was the eventually this project would become the home of a whole ecosystem of wave related things. If there is one current truth, it is that none of our groups has been independently successful in developing and distributing a widely used and adopted OT based collaboration project. I think together we can be more successful than apart. Yes that means we have to hash things out on the mailing list occasionally, but I think we are all open to input from anyone. If we can create a place for side projects, then perhaps people will be more free to bring their ideas and efforts here. To that end, I would put a call out to people who are currently working on related projects to officially joint the Apache Wave community. Contribute some code, whatever that may be. Help start a proof of concept for an OT Engine, work on the client server protocol, whatever you want to do, come do it here. Together we can keep our collective momentum. Become a committer here. We need you. Sincere Regards, ~Michael
