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

Hi :)
I think it might be good to forward this to OASIS.  THey already have collaboration between various 
projects to produce OpenDocument Format specifications.  I think that is part of what is being 
called for here?  A specification that can be shared by the various existing OpenSource office 
applications?
Regards from
Tom :)



--- On Fri, 14/10/11, timofonic timofonic <timofonic@gmail.com> wrote:

> From: timofonic timofonic <timofonic@gmail.com>
> Subject: [libreoffice-marketing] What about Real-time collaborative editing (RTCE) in 
> LibreOffice? A simple user POW proposal
> To: marketing@global.libreoffice.org
> Date: Friday, 14 October, 2011, 16:04
> 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.
>
> -- 
> Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to marketing+help@global.libreoffice.org
> Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/
> Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette
> List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/marketing/
> All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived
> and cannot be deleted

-- 
Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to marketing+help@global.libreoffice.org
Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/
Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette
List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/marketing/
All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted