"What exactly is the relationship between a rhino and a collaborative text editing platform?", you may ask. Word has it that I didn't even know myself. Now let me tell you who does: all the folks attending the Etherpad FAD at Olin College (shameless plug). And yes, that includes me, too.
And so today happened to be the first day of said FAD. We had a good crowd, both from the Olin and Fedora community - current students and alumni hacked side-by-side with open source community members, with the goal of making the Etherpad more... accessible. One valuable resource (and I recommend you to read the entire book, yes) was a certain part of a book called The Open Source Way. We spent most of the afternoon and evening comparing the differences between the upstream versions and forked libraries that come pre-bundled with Etherpad (it's a bad thing, really). People split out in teams and tackled different areas: without the people with Java and JS knowledge who were diff'ing different pieces of code and trying to find patches to let the entire project still work out, we packagers wouldn't even come close to getting Etherpad into Fedora.
But now we are. There are a couple of libraries missing. But we are close. Want to help? Come and join us for day 2 in #etherpad on FreeNode!
Oh, and about these rhinos? Yeah, finding a bunch of them bundled in a single project gave us quite some pain.
