I'm sick of having to decide between using cloud software and using local software. Cloud software so often needs subscriptions, and if the company dies I lose access to my data. Local software isn't collaborative. I don't want to email files around to myself, or think about versions.

So I'm building a software platform for local first applications on top of CRDTs. Its called Replica, though we haven't talked much about it yet. I want to be able to:

- Edit any data from one device in my house and have it just show up on any other device

- Share items with other people, and collaboratively edit with them

- Support lots of different applications - including multiple different applications live editing the same data. Like a universal plugin model.

Linux can't compete with cloud software like google docs because anyone running hosted platforms gets punished if the platform is successful. Ideally I'd love to get replica embedded in linux, as an alternative for desktop applications to use to store their state. Then users could open up the same app from different computers and have all their data there, and collaborative editing and things like that would just seamlessly work. I want to be able to open the same file in two different editors and have typing in one show up live in the other as I type.

I want to opensource the whole thing, but we'll probably go with some sort of open core model and charge for our official hosted version (which you want for backup and delivery). I want this project to be financially self sustaining - otherwise I don't think it'll survive. But still opensource enough that people can self host if they want to.

Personally, I wouldn't recommend Wolfram Alpha, or anything proprietary. If you have some programming knowledge (as OP is likely to), Sympy and Matplotlib are much more capable and controllable (and free!).

I think if you're building up skills and knowledge, it should be towards something you have control over and can use in any situation without worrying about licences, cost, etc. At my university, we teach undergrad engineers Matlab, and it just seems like an expensive clunky dead end to me (though their numerical methods knowledge should be transferable).

If I understand - with the piping you could share a read only terminal over the net?

My team has been using Atom and Teletype to pair - but no lightweight method to share the test console. Could this be it?

Looks like humanity needs some long-term-support version of an operating system, where "long term" would mean 50 years or so (not five or ten).

I've noticed a lot of open source projects that likely would've been written in C ~5 years ago (like databases) are now being written in Golang. Stuff like Caddy, Kubernetes, InfluxDB, etc.