XWiki Labs is proud to announce our participation in OpenPaaS research project with the collaboration of our industrial partners Linagora and Nexedi, and the academic support of the Loria laboratory at INRIA and the LIX laboratory at École Polytechnique.
With OpenPaaS, the consortium hopes to create a serious Open Source alternative to Google Docs and other similar cloud based online solutions.
The cloud is often seen as a free and convenient way to collaborate and share information but for Free Software and Open Source, it represents a step back.
Even the proprietary pay-per-copy model of the 1990's has the benefit of allowing a user to continue to use their version of software long after the company has disappeared or retired the product but a cloud offering can potentially change its terms and conditions or close up entirely, leaving customers with no options. This and the risk of information misuse and espionage leave many unable to take advantage of the benefits which the cloud has to offer.
By creating Open Source technologies with realtime collaborative editors, we hope to build an Open Source Ecosystem around an alternative cloud where customers can take their data with them and cloud providers can compete on convenience and pricing while cooperating on the software which makes the cloud work.
Through this we also hope to improve the options for self-hosted cloud solutions to equivalent of those which are available from industrial cloud providers.
In the project, there are many aspects including machine learning and auto-summarization, video conferencing, distributed secure document sharing, and creation of a stable and extensible hosting platform for cloud-enabled web applications.
At XWiki Labs, our main focus will be in the development of the best possible realtime collaborative editors of Documents, Spreadsheets, and Presentations.
Caleb James de Lisle
XWiki R&D Team Lead
