Etherpad's well suited for editing human-speak documents, but not a good fit for collaborative code editing. This is more in the vein of SubEthaEdit on the web, in vim, and in other editors (I presume).

This is going to be a friggin' boon for phone interviews.

Two reasons to care:

1) This is a YC company after a couple months. They'll continue to refine the product; imagine if Facebook had gotten set in stone back in 2007, released code, and didn't themselves continue to develop. I love F/OSS for some things, but this isn't the kind of software which usually gets developed well entirely by the OSS community -- it's design/UI/UX heavy.

Even if it were just a 100% clone today (which it isn't, it's better and worse in different ways), I'm excited what it will be in 6mo.

2) Social community and network effects are a whole lot more likely for this than for an embedded app. Again, standalone Facebook is way less interesting than facebook.com.

right, so let's all praise it and talk about it in a few months when it's a good product :)

From the install docs for etherpad-lite on Github, step one:

As root:

Okay, two words and we've just lost 98% of the computer users in the world.

Install all dependencies. We need the sqlite develob libraries, gzip, git, curl, wget, libssl develop libraries and python:

... and now we've lost most of the remaining 2%.

"SUPER easy" for you, "SUPER easy" for me, but the other 99.98% of the potential customers would also love to use the product.

Seems to happen to a lot of products that are 'simple'. It happened to Dropbox ("Why would I use this when I can do these other twelve steps to do nowhere near the same thing") and the Ipod ("Why would I need this when I have a CD Burner and a Discman" (srsly)). I think it's safe to ignore claims like it :)

Thanks for the link to Etherpad Lite - looks like a good project. That said, I set up Etherpad a long while ago for family and a few invited friends and installing it was fairly trivial. BTW, very roughly similar, but: Wave in a Box is also an easy install and I like the slightly simpler interface (compared to Wave itself).

Easy, Because it's a YC company. and everyone knows Paul Graham farts unicorns.

To get real for a minute. They may be able to make this into a nice money making niche product. There's plenty of open source products that people still pay money for. Just look at OSS content management systems.

Linux is an F/OSS Unix, but there was still room for Mac OSX. Some of us like nice things maintained by somebody else.