In its day (1997-2005) Groove was quite a sophisticated architecture and implementation of encrypted collaborative workspaces, using a decentralized P2P architecture augmented by optional store-and-forward relays that enabled fully offline use.
For endpoint authentication it supported direct peer key signing, or org-signed certs, or any combination.
Arbitrary collab apps could be built on a blockchain-like signed/encrypted transaction log with decentralized global ordering and automatic rollback, transaction insertion, and play forward. The most used apps were file folders, discussions, chat (with PTT), calendars, sketchpad, collaborative browsing, and more.
Interestingly, for several years, it was a "killer app" for those who needed confidentiality: USAID and numerous NGO's, US DoD, joint and coalition forces operating in Iraq, all the three letter agencies trying to collaborate across silos immediately post-9/11.
Quite a testament that decentralized architectures truly work when security is paramount. And also, concrete proof that even after immense investment, there is little appetite for decentralized solutions in enterprise and consumer domains.
Some background on one of the other two golang implementations mentioned in the comments.
Years ago I hired an Upwork contractor to port v1.5.3 to golang as best he could. He did a great job and it served us well, however it was far, far from perfect and it couldn't pass most of the JS test suite. The worst was that it had several recursion bugs that could segfault with bad expressions.
Early in 2025 I used Claude Code and Codex to do a proper, compliant port that passes the full set of tests and is safe. It was most certainly not a trivial task for AI, as many nuances of JSONata syntax derive from its JS roots.
Regardless, it was a great experience and here's the 2.0.6 AI port, along with a golang exerciser that lets you flip back and forth between the implementations. We did a seamless migration and it's been running beautifully in prod in Blues' Notehub for quite a while - as a core transformation capability used by customers in our JSON message pipeline.
FidoNet was a simply wonderful innovation, and it was a reflection of the creativity of its author - Tom Jennings - and his views of community and identity.
https://grokipedia.com/page/tom_jennings
Tom was working on FidoNet in 1984, the same time my Iris co-founders and I had begun work on what became Lotus Notes. Architecturally, those of us who were working on collaborative systems in that era were shaped by the decentralized architecture of USEnet - inspired and motivated by the observation that a community could be brought together by something technologically as simple as uucp.
Both dial-up focused, Tom took this in the direction of a decentralized BBS, while I took it in the direction of masterless replicated nosql databases we called 'notefiles'. Identity being at the core, Tom was focused more on public community while we focused on private collaboration.
It was such an exciting time for emergent decentralization, shaped by a strong dose of 60's idealism.
I began recruiting for what became Azure in Jan 2006. I was chief software architect / cto at the company. Amitabh Srivastava and the legendary Dave Cutler were the leads, with Dave focused on the hypervisor. (I'd met Dave in the 80's when he was at DEC and I was at DG.)
The project was in my team (CSA labs) but was cross-funded behind the scenes by Kevin Johnson, the president of Server & Tools. KJ & I did this because there was passive-aggressive resistance to a 'cloud first' design/architecture philosophy from within his org, where there was a deeply-rooted belief that enterprise servers and ops management tools would adequately scale-up.
KJ bought in and was all-in, as was the 'tools' part of his org (Soma & ScottGu). SteveB initially didn't quite know what to make of my desire and myriad efforts to fundamentally transform the company from packaged products toward services, and he had to cope with some of the wake I was leaving. It wasn't all smooth. But he believed in me and helped me to recruit internally, which was essential.
My explicit cross-funding agreement with KJ, my peer, was that when I decided it was the 'right time', I'd hand off my Azure org and it would be re-merged into S&T in more-or-less a 'reverse merger', with cloud leadership taking over server.
I launched Azure at PDC 2008 with what today we'd call lambda's (functions-as-a-service based on .net) & blobs & cloud database as the core services. Why no linux or windows VMs? They were absolutely part of day 1 plans, but a major political ploy from within KJ's team ('this will kill the server business') resulted in an active decision (mine) to defer until post-launch. It wasn't a technology issue, nor was it an OSS issue; the team believed in OSS & Linux. But shipping was top priority, and we shipped.
When I ultimately left the company in 2011, it was time to do the reverse merger that KJ and I had planned. A proven, super-talented manager from Bing that everyone loved, Satya, was chosen to lead the org as it was moved into S&T upon my departure. James Hamilton, the architect of Azure's relational DB, left for AWS.
Ultimately, under Satya, ScottGU & co ended up re-plumbing much of the original code with a by-then-ready Windows hypervisor, VMs & Linux, and all that you see today. By then the org finally was aligned and 'believed', and SteveB was genuinely 'all in'.
Getting products from 0 to 1 is sometimes a challenging process involving incredible people and stamina from believers at every level. In this case I'd say it was worth the effort.
For endpoint authentication it supported direct peer key signing, or org-signed certs, or any combination.
Arbitrary collab apps could be built on a blockchain-like signed/encrypted transaction log with decentralized global ordering and automatic rollback, transaction insertion, and play forward. The most used apps were file folders, discussions, chat (with PTT), calendars, sketchpad, collaborative browsing, and more.
Interestingly, for several years, it was a "killer app" for those who needed confidentiality: USAID and numerous NGO's, US DoD, joint and coalition forces operating in Iraq, all the three letter agencies trying to collaborate across silos immediately post-9/11.
Quite a testament that decentralized architectures truly work when security is paramount. And also, concrete proof that even after immense investment, there is little appetite for decentralized solutions in enterprise and consumer domains.