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Google Open Sources Etherpad, Piratepad Launches
Thomas Nybergh writes "The Etherpad code was released by Google under the Apache license a few hours ago. Google's initial plan, after acquiring the service, was to use Etherpad's tech with its new Wave collaboration platform and to shut down the original service entirely. Soon after the Etherpad code was released, the Swedish Pirate Party launched their instance of the service at piratepad.net. An announcement, which also mentions a new Tor node, is published on the party website (Google translation). The original Etherpad service had in a short time become a killer application for collaborative work within at least the Swedish, and according to my personal experience, in the Finnish Pirate Party as well. The Etherpad open source project is available at Google Code."
there's a reasonable explanation of what it is on the home page.
To the submitter, please include a link that explains what you're talking about next time.
Happy to see a Google acquisition which has not entirely abandoned their existing userbase, as they are assimilated. The company i work for has picked up using etherpads here and there, and was intending on doing so further, until the acquisition. I guess we'll probably give the code base a run, and try installing an internal copy :) Rock on Etherpad & Google guys.
There are lives at stake here!
Small wonder they wanted to acquire AppJet to send its programmers to the Google Wave slave mines to make Wave work more like EtherPad. I'm tickled pink they went through with their pledge to open-source it, and did it so quickly.
Isn't it amazing? This is the code that was AppJet's entire revenue stream...and after Google bought them for ten million dollars, they're giving all that work away to the community, free.
You can argue all you want about whether Google is really evil or not, but either way it certainly has its non-evil moments.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Etherpad is httpRequest javascript in a wysiwig which allowes collaborative editing in real time on a text doc with some rich text. My opinion is its a chat window where you type in the area the chat appears.
In a screenshot on their page is the example text "...Etherpads patent-pending sychronization algorithm makes sure everyones edits are merged in realtime".
I would see Gmail's live chat feature being quite close in concept. I wonder if Etherpad extended an open palm and inquired about renumeration.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
If Canonical is serious about promoting their cloud platform this should be relatively easy for them to host and roll client access into their next desktop release. They could also host the server component in their repo to make it cake to install on internal servers as well. Wave without the "Google" would be awesome.
http://etherpad.com/ep/pad/newpad
Click that link to see parts of the app in action
I was an early user of EtherPad and loved it! Took it up to host and maintain the site.
Try it out: http://www.ietherpad.com
Cheers.
What about using EtherPad for Wikis? Seems the perfect match: The learning curve is lower than for current Wiki markup (and ease of editing was one point of Wikis, after all), the history function is already included, and since it's now Open Source, the missing functionality (especially Wiki links) could easily be added.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
As far as I am aware, the plan is to make Wave an open protocol, where it can be completely isolated from anything Google by running your own stuff.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
As the owner of faxpad.com domain i have offered it for use to further the faxpad opensource project to replace etherpad.
http://www.twitter.com/JasonSnitker
yay multiplayer notepad
Wake me up when it can use OneNote documents and you can put more than just text on the pad.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
I just have one tiny question after reading it: What the fuck is Etherpad?
sic transit gloria mundi
Correct. Even MS, for example, could set up a Hotmail wave service. Wave is simply a protocol. http://www.waveprotocol.org/
You realize don't you that Google Wave is both open source AND open protocol?
It is federated like Jabber, anyone who wants to can download the wave source code and run their own wave server. And because it is federated, your server is not a walled garden - you can still join waves hosted on OTHER servers.
Seems far superior to this Etherpad in every sense of the word.
After building and running it locally yesterday morning, I started studying the code. I am not to interested in deploying it right now, but I might set it up in the future for use by family, friends, and customers.
I've had a Wave account for about 6 months (sandbox and beta) and I am more interested in building applications on top of Wave rather than hacking on the EtherPad code base. I am interested in learnng from the codebase however :-)
Apparently the Pirate Party has to move Piratepad to a new server already...
There is also uxoo.com. Free software at its best - other websites will certainly follow.
Hopefully all these competing services will do to good old plain text edition something just as great as youtube did to videos.
Start the competition!
Will it actually be reasonably supported in such a configuration? Google doesn't even support an open-source version of android that can actually make phone calls. They have lots of source code, but no releases or anything with QA behind it. Integrating proprietary drivers needed to actually make it work is a fairly manual process, and there are no guides/etc.
It seems like they're only willing to make it open-source to the extent that it doesn't cost them anything and it doesn't create viable competition.
From what I've seen Google open source projects don't really operate like normal open source projects. It is a proprietary cathedral model that publishes most of their source code, without much regard to whether the open source product is in itself something anybody would actually want to use. At least with mysql or whatever you can download the source for an actual release, and do a make install and get more-or-less exactly what you'd get if you just used their product.
With android, it's different. That's to do with the companies behind the phones not being willing to share. They clearly intend to make this fully supported.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
All we need is 1000 slashdotters and etherpad!
wanted: one clever sig,apply within
It's a *patented* protocol, without even an RFC. It's about as open as .docx, and it's got the same intent as .docx, too.
Way to drink the kool-aid, brunes69.
Just in case you don't want to have to click on a couple of links to get there.
Once you know what it is, the FAQ makes sense, but like way too many FAQs, it starts out by assuming you already know what the thing is and doesn't explain that.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks