I couldn't agree more. I've been working on CRDTs the last few years, and there's a huge opportunity here if we can reinvent the concept of the filesystem. Idea

I couldn't agree more. I've been working on CRDTs the last few years, and there's a huge opportunity here if we can reinvent the concept of the filesystem. Ideally, we'd replace files with CRDT-backed objects in the operating system. Then instead of fread / fwrite commands (which wastefully overwrite the entire file), applications could express semantic changes which get saved in a log. Those changes can be transparently replicated between applications, between devices and between users. We'd get better performance on-device, and automatic, transparent device-to-device replication. And we could trivially enable realtime collaborative editing between users. Better still, if it happened at the OS level, we could make it work in every application on the system. Right now "linux on the desktop" is slowly and inevitably dying in the face of cloud services. How would OpenOffice even compete with Google Docs? Do opensource application authors need to run their own web servers? (And if so, who pays for that?). If we replaced the filesystem with CRDTs, openoffice (and every other program on the desktop which edits "documents") could have best-in-class collaboration features, right there out of the box. There's an opportunity here to build a really amazing computing system.