Google Open Sources Etherpad, Piratepad Launches 126
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."
For the unititiated... (Score:5, Informative)
there's a reasonable explanation of what it is on the home page [etherpad.com].
To the submitter, please include a link that explains what you're talking about next time.
Re:For the unititiated... (Score:5, Informative)
I noticed that Google Translate writes the last couple of sentences of the news release as:
"PiratePad is freely available to all users. The party will save any logs from the service."
What it actually says in Swedish is:
"PiratePad is freely available to all users. The party will not save any logs from the service."
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Not just piratepad.net - I also see uxoo.com ! (Score:3, Interesting)
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!
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My limited knowledge of Scandinavian languages would not have caught that (though I have no real exposure to written swedish...just a year of norwegian applied against my danish heritage) although it would seem fishy for this particular group to want to log *anything*.
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There, was it really so hard to post that?
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Excellent point. It would of saved many hot electrons having to visit Jimmie Wales just to find out what it means.
Lately more and more submissions are accepted/posted without an explanation or description of what it's about like:
"Xcrypto has been updated to 1.3" is pretty meaningless to anyone who has no idea of what Xcrypto is.
So go waste your electrons and find out if you dare.
Pretty awesome (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Pretty awesome (Score:5, Interesting)
Is this better?
Re:Pretty awesome (Score:4, Funny)
Google grabs the tech and then markets the company as a tasty snack on the open day bbq.
Re:Pretty awesome (Score:4, Interesting)
Could this be good legislation to implement and curb or eliminate the Embrace=>Extend=>Extinguish business practices?
When you buy out a company that makes software, you must open source the current code. This would make companies more valuable standalone and increase competition, and also allow those that should die off to die off. If another company does wish to invest, competition is still there since the code is now open source.
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Re:Pretty awesome (Score:4, Interesting)
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However, how do you come up with a workable definition of "keep developing"? Would employing a drunk homeless guy to translate the comments in the source code from English to ancient hebrew making releases 6 monthly count?
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Actually he was sorta right, but I am glad the "thought experiment" for discussion going.
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It doesn't have to mean "lose all the software to the public".
More like "create a public open branch of whatever was created to this day".
Also, "open source" doesn't have to mean "free as a beer". You can grab the code, tamper with it, compile it, but to use it for anything meaningful you have to purchase a license, and to redistribute your modified code you must purchase a redistribution license, sending a part of your profit upstream.
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That is an even better clarification, and I like it.
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I think you're confusing Open Source with Free Software.
Also, while not necessarily benefiting the community, it benefits the customers.
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Yes, that is what I was saying. They would get the employees, buildings and other assets. Remember this was a question, not an "opinion" so please don't attack me directly for trying to think outside of the box.
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Sorry, see SharpFang's quote for better clarification, I forgot exactly what I meant since it had been a few days:
It doesn't have to mean "lose all the software to the public".
More like "create a public open branch of whatever was created to this day".
Also, "open source" doesn't have to mean "free as a beer". You can grab the code, tamper with it, compile it, but to use it for anything meaningful you have to purchase a license, and to redistribute your modified code you must purchase a redistribution license, sending a part of your profit upstream.
Though, I might would rather no redistribution license fees. But that is an interesting option. Perhaps if you use any open source software the fees would go to the original authors? (or a trust if author unavailable, for programming education or something)
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This is the obvious solution to the problem of out of print books that you still can't legally copy, even though you can't buy them,
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I like it, but I was looking for something that would kill 2 birds with one stone and curb bigger companies from just gobbling up smaller ones. This often does not make things better and I believe this idea would possibly help separate the wheat from the chaff more naturally.
Also, the original creator could be "paid" to lose the source. (Think big corps. wouldn't try it?) It would cost money to keep the source in escrow.
There are many legit reasons why something would no longer be available
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Did you miss the part where they said that etherpad.com would be shut down in March, with public pads likely being shut down even earlier?
EtherPad makes Google Wave look even worse (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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I honestly fear them more than anyone else at this point. That they can comfortably do things like this only shows how big they're getting!
Re:EtherPad makes Google Wave look even worse (Score:5, Insightful)
Be afraid.
Re:EtherPad makes Google Wave look even worse (Score:5, Insightful)
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Google is quickly becoming a large faceless megacorporation with questionable ethics regarding data storage, but at least they do some nice things.
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No, shopping through the mall with cash and without customer card is.
Re:EtherPad makes Google Wave look even worse (Score:4, Funny)
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I try to avoid them whenever possible (places like CVS will always swipe the store copy of the card if you talk to them right) but sometimes I just apply with bogus info. The only problem with applying with bogus info is that I still let them link all of my purchases together to determine more info about me. Sure, they think I am a 70 year old man with the buying habits of a college student but they still have a full customers worth of info. I want a system that l
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Not for long [slashdot.org].
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How exactly are you defining faceless?
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Yeah, I was just thinking that too. They're sort of like the machines in the Matrix. Google lives off of the energy generated by people who live in the Googtrix.
I don't know whether I should take the red pill or the blue pill. I really don't know which would be better. The this version of the Googtrix doesn't seem so bad to me. I worry about what things will be like when the leadership is turned over to someone more Ballmer-like.
Re:EtherPad makes Google Wave look even worse (Score:4, Funny)
Give me tasty, juicy, delicious steaks and I'll go and plug back in...
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You're right - it's exactly the same as with TV and Radio. The product is your eyeballs, the service is presenting advertisements to your eyeballs. The only difference is that what you get in return for your eyeballs is lots of actually useful services, not So You Think You Can Dance.
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No. All it shows is that software is NOT what Google is selling. Software is not Google's product. As such, they are very happy to release it as open source. It puts a good face on Google, makes the development community happy, and gets more developers working on the platform. Remember, Google sells advertisements. That is their product. Their goal is to "organize the world's information." These two things go hand-in-hand, but Google will not be able to do either if they try to maintain total contro
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Turn in your business card pup. Google is not and never has been a Marketing Company, Content Producer or anything more then a Service Provider. The service that Google provides is access to our Eyeballs and Minds. We aren't even a product becauuse of that. Just the access to them is all they sell - yet - until they figure out how to provide direct access to our minds, at which point "We Are Borg - Resistance Is Futile - You Will Be Assimilated" becomes reality. Until then everything that Google does has on
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Yes - you and I are the product!
Re:EtherPad makes Google Wave look even worse (Score:5, Insightful)
I really do think that this was the best thing that could possibly have happened to EtherPad. While it was still closed-source, it was locked up in the hands of one company. There was always the risk it could go away for good. (As very nearly happened right after Google bought them.) It's possible they might even have used the patent they claimed was "pending" to stifle competition if someone created a similar app from scratch.
But now it belongs to all of us, and anyone with the expertise to set it up can run a pad server for his own writing circle or for the world. People might even hack in new features and share them, like that Wave Federation thing Iba mentioned in the blog post.
But even if EtherPad's codebase stays the same forever, it's ours now and we can use it however we want.
Re:EtherPad makes Google Wave look even worse (Score:4, Interesting)
Is there something wrong with the Apache license? I'm really not up on the nuances of open source licensing - but I thought Apache was "good". A lot like the BSD license, right? You're allowed to make money with the software, but you can't lock the software away. This is good, in my book. Money isn't the determining factor in my book (gratis), but the freedom to use the software (libre).
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Money isn't the determining factor in my book (gratis), but the freedom to use the software (libre).
In the above sentence your uses of gratis and libre are identical.
A more common meaning of libre wrt to Free software is the freedom to "tinker." If someone gives you software to use any way you want but they don't provide the source your freedom to tinker is severely curtailed.
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GPL doesn't stop you making money.
The usual complaint about BSD-style licenses is that companies can take the hard work of others and profit from that without benefiting the community who provided the source in the first place. They do allow you to lock NEW features away ; they let you add things to the code, and distribute software without offering that new code.
That's the reason that corporate types like BSD-style licenses ; it lets them use existing code as a springboard to build the next great thing wit
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You can lock your version of the software away, meaning somebody can Embrace Extend and Extinguish the opensource version (example needed).
That phrase. I do not think it means what you think it means.
The very worst a company can do to EtherPad (already a complete, and excellent package) is to not improve it, or not release their improvements. The arguments against the BSD license don't really hold water when the package in question is stable and feature-complete.
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The arguments against the BSD license don't really hold water when the package in question is stable and feature-complete.
ROTFLMAO!
Lets assume feature-complete actually happens for more than 0.01% of all software programs.
If you actually get to that point then, by definition, the arguments against the GPL license don't really hold any water either.
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I don't think I understand your logic. Are you arguing that EtherPad is feature-incomplete? What additional features are necessary for it to function adequately for the vast majority of users?
Any significant expansion of EtherPad would logically lead to something not all that different from Google Wave. (which is already open-source).
I'm not implying that the "feature-complete" argument applies to terribly many software packages. However, I would argue that it does here.
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Are you arguing that EtherPad is feature-incomplete? What additional features are necessary for it to function adequately for the vast majority of users?
Irrelevant. I am pointing out that your claim about BSD licensing under the conditions of being feature complete and stable apply equally to the GPL.
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Why would facts about EtherPad be irrelevant to a discussion about EtherPad?
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Why would facts about EtherPad be irrelevant to a discussion about EtherPad?
Because I responded to a point that YOU made that was irrelevant to etherpad.
If you did not want to talk about licensing issues you should not have made a comment that applied generically to licensing issues.
Huh? How is this better than wave... ? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Huh? How is this better than wave... ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Seems far superior to this Etherpad in every sense of the word.
Technically speaking, Wave is superior (I've used both). However, what makes Etherpad so popular is that it is easier to use. As of this time, Wave is still in Alpha mode, and while I get it, many tech friends who have tried to use it really don't understand the applicability of the software. They don't see it as a much better way to collaborate. They still want to stick to traditional e-mail for organization (which I hate, particularly when conversation threading and search is not available in e-mail).
So, Wave = Technically Stronger; Etherpad = Usability is Stronger. Add the good parts of the two together, and you get a much better project overall.
Re:Huh? How is this better than wave... ? (Score:4, Funny)
(which I hate, particularly when conversation threading and search is not available in e-mail).
It is in gmail.
So Google's main competition to Wave is Google (Etherpad) and Google (Gmail) ?
I love companies that never stop innovating.
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From what I've seen on the web wave is open source in the same sense that android is open source. There are a bunch of files on a CVS server, with some build instructions that creates a program that does something, but it isn't something they actually intend anybody to actually use. In the case of android their open source code results in an OS that doesn't have access to the cell network or wifi, and which can't even blink the LED on the front from what I understand. Their build instructions are a real
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Technically Etherpad is Scala and Javascript, I don't think there is much Java to it.
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Yeah, but it is java - what a total let-down. I was expecting real, usable code. Not java.
Hopefully Google's intent is to re-write it all in python, php or c. Then I will be interested.
I feel like the kid on Christmas who wanted a bike but got a sweater.
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It's Scala and Javascript, not Java.
A hint as to buy-out reasoning. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:A hint as to buy-out reasoning. (Score:4, Interesting)
I would see Gmail's live chat feature being quite close in concept.
I don't. Being able to go back and edit what someone else has written previously is a fundamentally different concept IMO.
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GNU Screen has been around for a while.
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Since this is about editing, I think you mean gnuserv.
Re:A hint as to buy-out reasoning. (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, you're right, they're exactly the same thing.
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Ubuntu One Killer App (Score:3, Interesting)
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Google got the better part of the product--the developers. Without good developers, the code is probably pretty much useless.
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You forget that Canonical has a rather close relationship with Google - notice how they provided developers to help out with the ChromeOS release. It is not much of a stretch to believe that Google might reciprocate in some way by providing resources, code or even finished product to Canonical.
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All canonical typically do is repackage debian with newer packages... redhat and sun etc do all the heavy lifting with linux.
While free people to package stuff is useful, I somehow think google would be able to do that themselves if need be.
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While I agree that Google would be able to repackage stuff if need be, I disagree with your statement that all Canonical does is repackage stuff.
It might be a large part of what they do, but they write a lot of new code as well.
Unless that is exactly what you meant when you said "typically"
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Oh I know they do write new code as well, all I was saying is that compared to red hat and the like, their contribution is just a drop in the bucket. [sdtimes.com] (I'd consider 100X the the number of patches a significant difference)
So if google wanted to hire coders from another company, canonical would be an almost silly choice.
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Kroah-Hartman Attacks Canonical [linux-magazine.com], Linux Magazine (September 19th, 2008)
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Ubuntu only really has two things going for it that separate it from other distros, marketing and willingness to give proprietary drivers/codecs out of the box
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Why not implement a Wave server? Wave is also open source and anyone can set up a server
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Canonical would still need to build a user interface on top of the server component [google.com], 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 i
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Etherpad doesn't have a client, it runs entirely in a browser windows. There is already discussion of getting an instance hosted by Ubuntu, but it will have to be checked out by their security team before it is made official. Also, Debian and Ubuntu are trying to phase out Sun Java in favor of OpenJDK, but OpenJDK wouldn't compile Etherpad when I tried it, I had to use Sun's JDK.
Etherpad Wiki? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Of course you can mix it with...
This is how far I came in my quick rebuttal of your statement, before actually investigating the matter. After spending two hours doing that, I have come to the conclusion that you are absolutely correct, sir! Turns out, there is no formal definition of the MediaWiki syntax - it's just a number of regular expressions, and the implementation is the de facto standard.
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WYSIWYG_editor#State_of_WYSIWYG_and_MediaWiki_software [mediawiki.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki [wikipedia.org]
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Of course not every Wiki is MediaWiki, and even if you can't add it to MediaWiki or another existing Wiki, there's no reason why you couldn't create another Wiki based on EtherPad. It won't be used for Wikipedia, of course, but neither is MoinMoinWiki, UseModWiki or any of the other Wikis except MediaWiki.
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IRC (Score:1)
Meh (Score:1)
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Excellent Summary (Score:5, Interesting)
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RTFFP
(FP as in First Post)
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Well, the first post is just a classic first post, rightly moderated down to -1. You probably meant RTFSP.
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Sorry. I meant RTFFPTIMU.
(That is Modded Up)
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Good question. I had to click a couple of links to get to the home page [etherpad.com]:
To understand how it is really different, you need to read the FAQ:
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It's a collaborative real-time editor [wikipedia.org] for documents (in the broadest sense of the word).
I'm mostly using it to learn from (Score:2)
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 :-)
anyone want to write shakespere ? (Score:2)
Re:Wow! This blows me away. (Score:5, Informative)
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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
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Nice to see another open EP server. I'd suggest coming up with your own front page rather than ripping off Etherpad's, though. It could lead to confusion.