Some time ago I was fascinated by SubEthaEdit and read up on the theory behind it. I could not find out whether gobby/obby is an implementation of this paper, or if it is another idea. Today, I stumbled upon GOCollab which realizes collaborative editing in gnumeric and AbiWord, however they obviously did not read the paper, as they are having problems keeping the documents in sync (Such conflicts are unavoidable because software is not yet able to tell what its users really want – thats not true, go read the paper…).
Maybe obby could help them out a bit 😉