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Interestingly, this is the approach that OLPC and now Sugar Labs have taken for file access in Sugar, using the Journal activity. This is also the direction Gnome is heading in, with Zeitgeist and its GUIs.

It's a little strange at first, and it certainly can't replace normal file browsers completely, but it ends up being pretty convenient in day to day use. Of course, these aren't filesystems, just layers atop them.

This article talks a little -- but not too much -- about how it works:
http://www.abisource.com/wiki/AbiCollab
It seems to use "gocollab", or that was a previous name?

In 2005: http://gnomejournal.org/article/31/gocollab----peer-to-peer-document-collaboration

The next major version of GNOME Office will introduce a new way of handling the problem, called GOCollab. GOCollab will basically marry the already built-in revision systems of Abiword and Gnumeric with a P2P network comparable to file sharing applications like Gnutella or eMule. This means that neither Bob nor Jane nor anybody else needs a central server to be set up and run, and most of their changes to a document will be merged together automatically.

I am sure you can replace AbiCollab.net with your own server. Would be nice though if the websites code was Open Source.

Here are some screenshots of the website in action: http://abisource.com/release-notes/2.8.0.phtml

Erm, you want vino which has shipped as standard in GNOME (ie. all distros) for ages, at least 3 years AFAIK.

Rich.

You mean like Evolution's Virtual Folders?

As far as the product, hasn't Microsoft, Novell, and an ungodly amount of other smaller companies tried to do this before?

Novell has historically not been strong on IP networking; more recently they've figured out that IP is the way to go, but I haven't heard of any cross-platform, open-standard, widely-supported IP-network technology from them. Or from Microsoft, for that matter. (How many UPNP printers can you name?)

Has anyone used Bonjour?

Only pretty much every Mac user (Safari, iTunes, iPhoto, iChat, ...). Oh, and lots of GNOME users. And maybe a few Windows iTunes users.

What's network traffic like? ActiveDirectory and Novell are both rather chatty applications when it comes to the network.

It uses caching, duplicate message suppression, and exponential backoff. Traffic is unnoticably light.

If we can find a way to keep things quiet, this is a great idea. However, there's the challenge.

Good thing those engineers at Apple figured it out 5 years ago, then!

Zeroconf is the only service of its type that I've heard of. It's certainly the only one that runs on pure-IP networks, whose standard is open, which has multiple independent implementations, which has support from both proprietary and open-source camps, and is supported out-of-the-box by many major hardware manufacturers. If there's any competition in this area, I don't know what it is.

Most distributions, for legal reasons, only ship a small subset of GStreamer 0.8 plugins. Because GStreamer's plugins are built from the same source module, each packager was forced to split it up to remove components that were illegal or unwise to use in their particular area of operation. The amount of custom code caused a number of problems for users. To solve this, 0.10 has five plugin modules called base, good, ugly, bad and ffmpeg. Base and good contain plugins that any distribution can ship without fear of potential legal issues. Ugly contains well-maintained plugins which may or may have legal issues of some form, generally patent or license issues. Bad is an incubation area where new plugins mature before moving to good or ugly. If a plugin never matures, it may remain in bad for the rest of its life. ffmpeg contains wrappers for all the codecs in the ffmpeg package. This new scheme will allow downstream packagers to have more consistent package naming and installation scripts, making it easier for users to discover and install the plugins that they need.

The base package is not intended to contain all the plugins required by a typical GStreamer setup. Instead, it contains one important example of each type of GStreamer plugin. The code and documentation for base plugins will remain current so developers will always be able to create new plugins from a known working code base.

I see no mention of the . Galago (Presense management). Will this stuff ship with gnome 2.10?