Etherpad
In continuous open-source development since 2009, Etherpad is the original really-real-time
collaborative editor - used by Wikimedia, governments, EU public-sector institutions, and tens
of thousands of self-hosters. Its core idea is visible authorship: every keystroke is
attributed with author colors, every revision preserved, and the timeslider lets you scrub
through a document's entire history character by character. Multiple people type into the same
pad and see each other's changes instantly - it scales to thousands of simultaneous editors
per pad. The base install is deliberately lightweight; capability comes from roughly 290
plugins installable from the admin web UI: comments, images, tables, drawing, video chat via
WebRTC, math rendering, code highlighting, and authentication via OAuth, LDAP, or OpenID. AI
is pointedly a plugin, not a default - you choose the model and infrastructure, or never turn
it on. There is no telemetry. For integrators, an HTTP API (with OpenAPI definitions at
/api/openapi.json) manages pads, users, and groups for embedding in your own applications, and
the ueberDB abstraction layer supports PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB, and SQLite backends.
Full data export is built in, the format is open, it is translated into 105 languages, and it
runs on anything from a Raspberry Pi to a server farm. Apache 2.0 licensed, Node.js based.
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