Google Wave lives on as 'Wave in a box'

Google is offering developers a reduced functionality version of its defunct Wave application suite dubbed 'Wave in a box'.

The company has open sourced around 200,000 lines of code, including an application bundle of a server and web client supporting real-time collaboration, support for threaded conversations and the ability to import existing Wave data.

"This project will not have the full functionality of Google Wave as you know it today," said Google software engineer Alex North in a blog post.

"However, we intend to give developers and enterprising users an opportunity to run Wave servers and host Waves on their own hardware. We hope this project will help the Wave developer community continue to grow and evolve."

Google pulled the original Wave suite, which used a combination of email, instant messaging, wikis and blogging, citing lack of interest. But the code could get a new lease of life as an open source project.