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I use http://gobby.0x539.de/ (GNU GPL'd)

Canonical would still need to build a user interface on top of the server component, so while it is a good idea there would still be quite a bit of work for Canonical to do as Google has not and most likely will not open source their own Wave implementation. Then again, let's not forgot that Google Wave in the current state is completely unusable for both communication (chat, discussion etc.) and any form of collaboration (specifically collaboration on documents). EtherPad on the other hand actually nails it regarding document collaboration.

So integrating EtherPad support into Ubuntu One would be feasible in the short term, at least to allow users to work together on Notes. It would be double as awesome if there was an effort to integrate support for libinfinity (from Gobby) in Tomboy (which already synchronizes with Ubuntu One). Then for collaboration over the web you'd use Ubuntu One's EtherPad functionality and in your desktop you can easily collaborate from within Tomboy.

And if you can't wait for Google Wave, there's always Gobby. It's only a plain-text editor (basically multiplayer gedit), but the real-time stuff is really real-time -- it updates instantly. Have a look at their screenshots.

And if you can't wait for Google Wave, there's always Gobby. It's only a plain-text editor (basically multiplayer gedit), but the real-time stuff is really real-time -- it updates instantly. Have a look at their screenshots.

SubEthaEdit is different - what the grand-parent poster is pointing to is remote sessions - where you basically take your text editor (or LISP runtime or whatever Emacs is these days) and can log into it remotely and execute commands. A bit like GNU Screen or a bit like VNC.

What makes SubEthaEdit cool is the collaborative editing environment: that lets you have one document with multiple people editing it at the same time all using their own installations of SubEthaEdit. Well, there actually is a way of doing that with Emacs too. Gobby is an X11/GTK+ app that does much of what SubEthaEdit does (but without the Mac OS X prettiness). IIRC, there's a plugin for Emacs available which lets it join Gobby/Sobby sessions. (Sadly, nothing for us Vim users.)

There's also EtherPad which is all written in JavaScript and runs in the browser. I use it for collaboratively scribing meetings. Sadly, much as I'd like Gobby to be cross-platform, it's not quite there: it works great on Linux. I've heard nothing bad about it on Windows. But on Mac OS X, it's a pain in the arse to get working.

Gobby or MoonEdit

Multi-user screen: http://aperiodic.net/screen/multiuser Gobby (multi-user text editor): http://gobby.0x539.de/trac/

GNU Screen is, of course, always an option if you can use a command line text editor like vim or emacs.

Gobby is pretty decent, although it's a bit more limited as an IDE.

I've always preferred NetBeans for this sort of thing, although nothing yet satisfies all of my peer programming requirements. I need an editor that lets one person follow another, and take turns editing, not something that just lets two people edit the same file at the same time. I'd argue whether the latter is of any use at all.

--- SER

I had this Idea few years ago to make a free software colaborative Java IDE for multiple users to work on the same code at the same time. The friend I was about to program it with (but didn't) sent me a link few months ago. I think it's basically the thing we were trying to do. To be honest I didn't try it out, but from the sound of it, it's the thing you want. Here's the link: http://gobby.0x539.de/trac/ In you decide to use this, please write down my nickname. I'd like to hear your experiences with it. Thanks.

Use gobby... you host it locally (well, the gobby client can act as a server, or you can run a standalone server, sobby).

http://gobby.0x539.de/trac/

"Gobby is a free collaborative editor supporting multiple documents in one session and a multi-user chat. It runs on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and other Unix-like platforms. " It is GPL, easy to use and lets you code together very rapidly. http://gobby.0x539.de/trac/

How about gobby... http://gobby.0x539.de/trac/ ?

It is less hassle to use a distributed version control system such as Git or Bazaar. It also helps to split up the work into several files where each author is primarily working on one of them and use include-statements in the master file. I also recommend to maintain a "Makefile" which takes care of running bibtex, converting SVG to EPS, creating renderings with POVRay, ... so that a single "make" on the command line will update the document. If you just want to write a draft, you could try a distributed editor such as Gobby.

Gobby collaborative editor + LaTeX. It would literally be a living document!

It would be what dishonest people keep trying to turn the Constitution into in order to justify their desire for state power?

I know that isn't what you were getting at. I'm being somewhat facetious but I do have a point.

Gobby collaborative editor + LaTeX. It would literally be a living document!

Care to elaborate on your experience? On first glance the features look pretty good.

http://gobby.0x539.de/trac/ seems very cross-platform to me too. Who needs ctrl-z anyway if not using bash?

Gobby is an open source client-server application which supports multiple documents in one session, document synchronisation on request, password protection and an IRC-like chat for communication.

Google documents or Zoho or some other gratis (but typically proprietary) "cloud" solution might be reasonable.

If you're fine with text-only, you have a lot of options. VIM and EMACS both allow collaborative editing, you can share a screen session, or you can get a specialized collaborative editor (such as Gobby and ACE) or a specialized framework, such as DocSynch

If you need light-weight word processing, Abiword has a plugin for real-time collaboration.

Heavier weight word processing of DOCX can be done with Plutext.

If you need more graphical documents & the above doesn't seem to fit AND if you have a small group of friends who you trust, I'd just go "simple" & host with VNC or some other remote desktop protocol.

As far as other pieces, there is a lot of good F/OSS voice/IM/whiteboard software. Coccinella and ekiga are good examples.

Don't know anything about the Summer Of Code project, but you might find Gobby interesting.

-- Jamie

But with IRC you can't save files or edit the already added parts.

A true "multi-player" notepad would be Gobby, which is quite cool!

I am actually sympathetic to the basic idea here: New platform.

I'm newly skeptical of the approach of endlessly creating side-systems on the web browser.

There are amazing things that are possible when you make a new platform for integrating ideas.

For example, we can envision a world where you can watch people writing blog posts as they write them. We can imagine working on documents together with others in real-time. We can imagine social networks, we can imagine shared web browsing. We can imagine going to a web page, and seeing other people who happen to be browsing the web page at the same time as well. We can imagine looking at them, seeing what their affiliations are; There are all these things. We have seen voice communication. Within 10 years, good voice synthesis will be coupled, and we'll be able to look and sound like anybody.

Now, what we haven't seen, even in our imaginations, is all this stuff working together. Integrated into one platform.

Doing this stuff piece-meal, a little bit at a time, on the edge of the network, isn't going to work. It's just not. It'd take forever. Building new standards into the existing network just takes forever. There is no design team. Nadah. Nothing.

Where we see the cool stuff happening, really, is in these large behemeouth new platform.

Now, sure, we can get some milage out of AJAX. We can do sophisticated things with that.

But are we really going to make a 3D world with live document editing, voice & synthesis, presence, infinite versioning on everything, avatars, the whole thing, yadda yadda yadda, using just AJAX? Within 10-15 years? Hell no! It takes at least at least 5 years to make a new specification pretty much standard amongst users. Even RSS aggregators have only 10% penetration amongst blog readers.

What does this mean? It means that a new platform is in the works. Whether you know it or not, a new platform is in the works. Which of the new upstarts is going to be it, remains to be seen.

Sure, sure, sure-- there will be gateways between the world of Vanilla HTML + AJAX into these new worlds.

At some point, you can make a computer render pictures of the new world, and ship them off in AJAX. You can even play Lemmings in the browser now. (Well, you could have...) But the new world is going to be built in the new world. It's not going to be built piecemeal out here in weblandia. When we use browsers to access it, it will be a window into that world, but it will not be that world.

Actually they do not have one single screen - they all editing files simulataneously using gobby : http://gobby.0x539.de/

There's a list of collaborative real-time document editors at WikiPedia:Collaborative_real-time_editor One of them is Gobby, which is multi-platform and free software. But you want version control, too; so I guess that would be a wiki which support real-time simultaineous editing. Some of the wikis have been talking about this (example), but I don't know if it's been implemented yet. I believe one project along those lines is the Yarrr extension to MediaWiki.