indiWiz.com

I was reading the book Beautiful Teams. There is an essay by Cory Doctorow titled The Copyfighters Take Mordor. In this essay Doctorow recounts how a set of sparsely-funded freedom-loving individuals fight the might of Corporate funded copyright groups from passing a new international law to curb freedom in the UN. If freedom-fighters had not succeeded, the present world would have been different. Even distribution and editing of Creative Common licensed media work would be controlled by the broadcaster (even if the author of the digital work gave permission otherwise). Thankfully the freedom-fighters won!

The hightlight of this fight is a tool. The tool is a collaborative text editor for the Mac called SubEthaEdit. During the boring and tedious meetings in the UN where the Corporates were selling their idea, our own set of free-individuals recorded the transcript, collaboratively-edited (using SubEthaEdit) and posted the information for the world to see in various blogs. This had caught the attention of the world, and now, the world is a better place.

SubEthaEdit interested me. I wanted to try it. Unfortunately, SubEthaEdit is available only for Mac. I was disappointed. Then I searched for OpenSource alternatives. This lead me to Gobby. Gobby is a GTK+ application which can run in Linux, Mac and Windows. For example, in Ubuntu I installed it thus:

$ sudo apt-get install gobby

Gobby is cool. Checkout some of the screenshots I took. Gobby could prove to be a powerful tool for code-review and collaborative document editing/review.