Tag Archives: rip

Google to shut down Wave

Leave a reply

Google announces that Google Wave is to be no more, amongst reasons cited are that it hasn’t gain the traction Google has hoped for. This is hardly surprising for me, Google Wave is just too complex for most. It tries to be everything and failed to stand out.

Google Wave logo

(It’s time to wave goodbye.)

Update on Google Wave

Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave.

Wave has taught us a lot, and we are proud of the team for the ways in which they have pushed the boundaries of computer science. We are excited about what they will develop next as we continue to create innovations with the potential to advance technology and the wider web. (Source: Google Blog)

RIP. And thank goodness I didn’t explore the Google Wave API much.

Django 2.0 released?

1 Reply

A company, Vyper Logix Corp, has released Django 2.0 without the blessings of the Django Software Foundation. According to James Bennett, the software is built on the Django 0.96.2 codebase which includes a critical bug.

Who would have thought opensource projects could be ripped off that blatantly. Django is a registered trademark of the Django Software Foundation, perhaps a warning could be issued. There’s really no point wasting time and resources pursuing this incident.

The man behind Django 2.0 is Ray Horn whose public LinkedIn profile can be viewed here. He owns a patent, a Python blog where he blogs as “Guido Python” and wrote some dubious Python software. (Guido van Rossum, by the way, is the Python’s Benevolent Dictator For Life.)

In the LinkedIn profile, he claims to be:

  1. Supporting around over 2 million lines of Python codes.
  2. And I quote “Accomplished, seasoned Consultant with over 30+ years experience in web based software using ColdFusion and JavaScript/AJAX; consultation work includes SBC/AT&T, IBM, Stanford University, NationsBank, and Multimedia Live.”
  3. And I further quote “Recently produced 6000 lines of JavaScript code in less than 3 weeks; 3200 lines comprised a reusable JavaScript based AJAX Framework.”

Wow I didn’t know there’s AJAX back 30 years. Didn’t know ColdFusion existed too. Erm, did the web even exist 30 years ago? The JavaScript code… I hope he didn’t release it as JQuery 2.0.

It appears it is not the first time, he did something like this. He has been criticized for taking BlogCFC, rebranding and releasing it for profit.

I am unsure if he did anything wrong here. He probably didn’t as the license might have allowed him to alter the software for commercial purposes so it is attributed back to the author. (I am not expert in software licenses.) But what he did here violates commonsense software ethics because there weren’t significant change from the opensource version. It just start to get me thinking – how to stop such activities. At the end of the day, it’s up to buyers to decide if they are willing to trust the Ray Horn brand or not.