Google Wave is dying, what now?

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 Right, Google has decided that the Google Wave service is due for the dumpster. It hasn't achieved the sort of take up they were hoping for (I won't be talking about that right now, suffice it to say there is a whole blog post in that). This also means that the team working on Wave is going to be broken up, with people like Pamela Fox (the slightly manic but truly excellent Developer Relations person for Google Wave), Anthony Baxter and Dan Peterson being split up and sent on to greener pastures.

So what now? Should everyone who's been working on external wave projects just give it up as 18 months of wasted effort? What about those people who have taken up wave as a collaborative tool and have started to merge it with their current work practices?

I think it's going to fall to us in the community to carry on the torch if we really want to see the Wave technologies achieve their full potential. This means that we're going to have to get organised and have a good old sit down chat with Google about their existing code base and exactly how much could be open sourced, whether they want to see it succeed externally and what we can do to continue the development of Wave outside of the Googlesphere.

To this end I'm proposing a Wave Foundation or similar. The idea would be to take the code and protocols as they exist now and divest the copyrights to the foundation. The board of the foundation could be made up in the following manner:

Governing Board - 5 Members - 1 Google Rep, 1 Corp Advisory Board Rep, 3 elected members

Corporate Advisory Board - Made up of Corporate Members

That's just an idea, certainly not set in stone, however I think we're going to need something similar to take Wave forward.