At this point, even my dad has asked me what I think about Google Wave (sorry Dad for any tech-savvy intimations!). Since Wave is in the process of rolling out to a much larger audience of testers and developers, it seemed like an appropriate time to jot down some thoughts about it. But first, an announcement: as widely discussed around the web, Wave uses the XMPP protocol under the hood and in particular works with the Openfire XMPP server (see Wave Federation install docs). Openfire was developed by Jive and we continue to sponsor it as an Open Source project. Up to this point, Openfire has been available under the GPL license. We've moved Openfire to the more liberal Apache 2.0 Open Source license, which is the same license used for the Google Wave Federation project. This change is already reflected in the Openfire source tree and an official release will be made soon. We hope and believe that the more liberal Apache 2.0 license will help unleash a new wave of innovation around Openfire (bad pun gleefully intended).

So, Wave itself -- though the project is still in the early stages (and far from ready for prime-time, especially in an enterprise setting) it's generated an enormous amount of buzz. No doubt a large part of that excitement is due to it being from Google. But more importantly, Wave is pushing the boundaries of what's possible in a web browser with a super rich and real-time user experience. It serves as inspiration to all of us that develop collaboration software. While it's still a bit early for Jive to have an official position on Wave, we're definitely following it closely and the Wave concepts align well with our roadmap. So much has been written about Wave already that I won't attempt to duplicate any of the existing detailed overviews. But I do have my personal three favorite things about Wave:

1. Wave will help drive adoption of HTML 5 by serving as such a compelling example of what that technology makes possible.
2. Wave uses XMPP as the back-end protocol. Yes, I'm a nerd for loving a protocol.
3. Federation is baked-in. This was a visionary move by Google and big win for an open internet in the new world of monolithic web sites/services.

It will be fun to watch where all of this goes.