(Since I wrote this post, I’ve been told that EtherPad has indeed already gone open source. I hadn’t realized they had done it already)

As readers might remember, Etherpad, the great collaborative tool that is on both The Best Online Tools For Real-Time Collaboration and The Best Online Tools For Collaboration — NOT In Real Time , was bought by Google recently and they were shutting it down.

Then, after the negative response to that plan, they made some modifications to it. They said they were going to made their code available, but I didn’t think they were going to do it so soon.

Now, there’s a new web application called PiratePad that appears on the surface to be the same as EtherPad and, in fact, on its home page says it’s powered by EtherPad.

PiratePad looks good.