Collaborate With Gobby

Collaboration was always one of the goals of the Internet, but for a long time, the tools lagged the vision. Nowadays, though, we have wikis, instant messaging, and other software that allows people to work together. Even Microsoft is getting into the act by pushing its expensive and proprietary SharePoint software onto unsuspecting businesses around the world.

But what about something more simple? How about a tool that allows a distributed team work on the same document at the same time, and even chat about the changes being made? Science fiction or fact?

Mac OS X users have had the very nice SubEthaEdit (http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/) available to them for years, but it costs $35 and only works on Macs. Now Linux users have a similar tool: Gobby.

Gobby is GPL software that’s built to work on Linux, of course, but is also available on Windows and Mac OS X, meaning that teams using disparate operating systems can still work together (once again Linux developers work hard to write software that all computer users can use… but that’s another rant for the future).

Installing Gobby is easy for users of Debian- based distros: just run apt-get install gobby. You’ll be asked if you want to install additional packages, so go ahead and agree. If you’re using Fedora Core, yum install gobby does the trick; for other distros, search Google for gobby installationguide (note that the words…

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