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Mac users have been blessed with SubEthaEdit - "Recieving high praise from all users of the program, this truly is the "Killer app" of Pair Programming or Extreme Programming over long geographic distances."

Quoting Chris Schmidt and his "An open letter to the CodingMonkeys" [Aug 8, 2004] that ends with:

"If you wish to add your voice into this debate, feel free. I would be interested in hearing thoughts on either side of this issue - for or against the public release of such a protocol. However, it should be made clear that such a tool will exist on other platforms eventually, with or without the help of the originators of SubEthaEdit."

This time has come - "Gobby" is what SubEthaEdit is for Macs, but open source and runs virtually everywhere (in early / beta stage of its life though):

Gobby is a free collaborative editor supporting multiple documents in one session and a multi-user chat. It runs on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and other Unix-like platforms.

It uses GTK+ 2.6 as its windowing toolkit and thus integrates nicely into the GNOME desktop environment.

Check out the Gobby's list of features, take a look around in our screenshots section and download it right now.

There is more: this project also offers Obby - a framework used to synchronize document changes. There is work on integrating this framework into other editors and I can't wait to see it integrated into Eclipse (despite no news about integration with this particular tool).

An example: Ebby - an implementation of Obby protocol in Emacs Lisp.

And there is Sobby - a dedicated server for collaborative editing using Obby protocol.

Linux.com article "Collaborative text editing with Gobby" by Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier should provide more information in case if you are interested. His summary:

Despite its immaturity, Gobby is a good choice when two or more users want to collaborate on a text document in real time. Want to browse through a log file with another admin to troubleshoot a problem, or work together to edit a configuration file? Need to write up release notes for a project, work on some documentation, or put together a requirements list? Gobby makes things much simpler than passing around a text document or OpenOffice.org file with changes. The Ubuntu folks are even using Gobby to allow remote developers to participate in the Ubuntu Developer Summit.

Gobby's developers have done an excellent job so far, and I'm looking forward to seeing what new and interesting features they will add in the future. With any luck, other developers will start integrating Obby into their editors, and we can all collaborate no matter which editor we prefer.