> Lionel Dricot [0], Dr. Daniel Smith [1, 2], Michiel de Jong [3], Mike > Macgirvin [4], and Markus Sabadello [5] seem to have come to similar > conclusions: having a bunch of semi-interoperable applications that do > the same thing but don't share their data is wasted effort and added > complexity (it's "silly"). When applications can share their data store > and give the privilege, responsibility, and complexity of storing their > data to a separate data layer, writing applications becomes a lot easier > and the applications themselves become more reliable, flexible, and > under the user's control.
The One Laptop Per Child includes a shared text editor that works in realtime, based on AbiWord, and which uses the Telepathy "tubes" sharing interface. See: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activity_sharing http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Collaboration_Tutorial http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Telepathy http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Tubes http://www.collabora.com/projects/telepathy/ This code was also eventually released in the mainstream AbiWord version 2.9.1 in 2011, as part of the "Collaboration plugin": http://www.abisource.com/release-notes/2.9.1.phtml http://magazine.redhat.com/2008/05/08/abiword-team-interview/ http://devworks.thinkdigit.com/Software/LibreOffice-Take-Steps-Towards-Collaboration-Support_9146.html http://www.abisource.com/wiki/AbiCollab https://abicollab.net/ Despite that last link, this is not a web-based service; two or more users of AbiWord can collaborate directly via TCP (without using any server as an intermediary), or can collaborate via a Jabber/XMPP chatroom (using an XMPP server), or via LAN multicast using the Salut local-area shared chat protocol (no server). This AbiWord collaboration is a different thing than multiple people editing separate copies of a document and then sending their revised copies to each other for merging, git-style. Instead, the editor program sends each tiny change to each other shared instance of the editor, as the changes are made, so all can see the same document within seconds of each change being made. But at the same time, this model requires that everyone who's sharing be online at once, which the git-model does not require. I think the world has uses for both models, and wouldn't it be lovely to have a word processor that did both? I'm not totally sure what this discussion has to do with FreedomBox, since the FreedomBox is a server that sits unobtrusively in a corner, not something that runs software and a GUI in the machine in front of the user. A FreedomBox could be a back-end server (and could help to form a network of federated servers) in such a document-sharing protocol, but to be useful and visible to a FreedomBox user, we would still need a separate front-end GUI program that ran on the user's tablet or laptop or phone or whatever. John _______________________________________________ Freedombox-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss
