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Why can't FOSS do this, though? There's no reason Inkscape couldn't work the same way, where a document lives in the cloud and users pass around links to it.

It does require someone to maintain and pay for the cloud hosting. That shouldn't be unsolvable; that's not really any fundamentally different than hosting a download site for traditional FOSS. Donation-supported FOSS can work.



It requires a total redesign of the app and architecture. Being able to live stream edits in and conflict resolution.

But I think the biggest barrier is most FOSS enthusiasts consider web apps and collaboration to be anti user malware.


Sounds like there's a need for:

1. A generic CRDT library, preferably in C or something that exposes a C interface. This is probably very hard or even impossible, depending on how much must be abstracted and how much work the developer must do to express edits in terms of the CRDT.

2. A P2P backend for said library for streaming edits.

3. A networked data store, maybe as-a-service, for versioning and persistence.

2 and 3 might even be made transparent to non-CRDT-aware applications through FUSE, but that's not a hard requirement.


Did you know, Inkscape used to have live sharing of documents.

It was removed because no one wanted to maintain it.

It's not impossible to imagine it being added back in though. Maybe with updated technology.


Noone wanted to use it in the first place :)




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