[libreoffice-marketing] What about Real-time collaborative editing (RTCE) in LibreOffice? A simple user POW proposal

Hello to everyone.

I'm just an user of LibreOffice, no developer at all. But I think
maybe this can be an interesting discussion with the more skilled
people involved into the project.

Since the apparition of SubEthaEdit for Macs, the real-time
collaborative editing (from now on referred as RTCE) started to rise
from these days. The Web 2.0 phonomenom made RTCE even more known with
Writely and EtherPad, then Google bought both (but EhterPad now
remains as a FOSS project) to integrate resources to the Google Docs
online Office suite.

There are editors that already support RTCE, like AbiWord (by using
AbiCollab extension), ACE, Emacs (by extensions like Rudel or others)
and Gobby. Unfortunately there aren't a strong open standard protocol
shared among them, so interoperability is a big issue there.

RTCE is something thinked before in OpenOffice and seems also taken in
account in LibreOffice as future ideas to develop, but the approach
and ideas behind it were primitive or their importance is still not
enough considered.

http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Crazy_Ideas#Simple_server-based_collaborative_editing

There's an open RTCE protocol named Infinote ( http://infinote.org ),
a redesign of the Obby protocol that is part of Gobby and implemented
in libinfinity. There's a server implementation named Infinoted and
the protocol is already user by some third party applications but the
popularity is quite low at this moment.

There's "jarn.xmpp.collaboration"
(http://pypi.python.org/pypi/jarn.xmpp.collaboration), a XMPP protocol
extension targeted at RTCE. The protocol is still quite young, but
still actively developed.

The use of an open protocol standard would not just help
interoperability between different projects, but also improve the
protocol for being more flexible and powerful over time in the same
way of ODF.

While interoperability with existing projects is very cool and nice,
this isn't going to resolve the issue in the long term. Those projects
will stay incompatible between them, and each new project may choose a
new protocol that LibreOffice developers would need to implement it.

I understand an initiative like this isn't easy at all, because it's
not only developing a powerful and well documented RTCE protocol. Like
in the example of Infinote, that means nothing if the protocol isn't
adopted and promoted widely by other related projects.

This is a proposal from the user point of view, but I hope to make
some people think about it. In my opinion this could be a "killer app"
for LibreOffice and also gain popularity in
education/business/government environments too.

I'm supossing this concept would require developer efforts, lots of
PR, contacting with other organizations and such. Make people agree on
standards seems not easy, but I think is possible if people do the
necessary effort (as showed in ODF).

With a bit of research from my illiterate perspective, I already found
other theorical and practical proposals and experiments on RTCE. So I
think more skilled people can investigate further on the tecnical side
of this if there's enough interest on it.

Please think about this proposal and give your opinions.  I hope my
thinking can be at least a bit useful to the community to start an
interesting discussion about the topic.

Regards.

PS: I think this can be even more interesting to investigate from now
on since the appearing of the LibreOffice Online project.

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