Even a 40-year-old can acquire new skills and take on entirely new roles.

One of these was the subject of a talk by Allotropia's Thorsten Behrens, Distributed real-time collaboration for Writer – a first prototype. This is a mode where multiple people, each with their own local copy of LibreOffice Writer running on their own machine, can all work together simultaneously on the same collaborative document. There's a little more info in his slide deck [PDF], which explains that this is achieved using CRDTs, or conflict-free replicated data types – the same tech whose use we described in the Zed programmer's editor last year.

It's the same sort of functionality that you get from Google Docs, and indeed this is already possible using the Collabora Online web-based version of LibreOffice. The big difference is that such tools run in a browser, so you need to be online. What makes the CRDT implementation different is that this is a local app, working on a local file, but using a network copy to keep changes in sync. The idea is to free you from keeping your apps and data on someone else's computer, without losing the handy collaborative features that web apps bring.