Ever since Google Wave finally turned out the lights about a year ago, I have wondered what was going to happen to the project. I was pleased to find out that Google has handed the project off to Apache, and the project has been renamed to Apache Wave. Being open source, that meant I could install it myself to play around with it.

However, I have to say that I am kind of disappointed with the progress of the project since Apache took it over. Wave lacks an actual persistence layer, meaning that any waves created in the application are lost when the server dies. (Edit: As it turns out, I am wrong about this and it does in fact support saving waves.) I haven’t searched through bug trackers and mailing lists, but that seems to me a pretty big issue, and one that would be near the top of any developer’s todo list. It also somehow appears more sparse than Google’s offering, with many missing features and several broken plugins.

I don’t want to rail on the project. It’s open source, so those people who contribute to the project are being gracious with their time as it is. I just don’t see it becoming the collaborative email replacement app that it really could have been unless it gets a lot more love and attention.

As has been publicized in many places, the beta for Windows 7 is available to the public, which is a first for Microsoft if I recall correctly. Product keys to activate the beta are available for the first 2.5 million people to download the software, which will expire on August 1. It has been made clear that the expiration date for the beta is not the official release date for Windows 7 (by then, there will be a new beta or perhaps even a release candidate).

I just ordered a new hard drive and will likely be giving this bad boy a test run. Vista gets railed on for a lot of things, so hopefully Microsoft has paid attention.