Proton launches privacy-focused Google Docs alternative: Docs in Proton Drive is an open-source, end-to-end encrypted collaborative document editor

proton.me Introducing Docs in Proton Drive – collaborative document editing that’s actually private | Proton

Create docs and collaborate in real time on documents knowing they are end-to-end encrypted.

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“After years of pushing their proprietary and closed solutions to privacy minded people Proton decided that it was in their best interest to further bury said users into their service as a form of vendor lock-in. To achieve this they made yet anoter non-standard groupware feature - a document editor.
- Is there an open standard for encrypted asynchronous colabreative document creation and editing?
  
  As open components, we have the OpenDocument standard + signal protocol for E2EE + CRDTs for conflict resolution. No idea whether they're compatible though.
  As a product, Collabora Online is open and collaborative.
  
  Collabra seems close. They do use ODF. And you can host you're own server.
  But they don't seem to use E2EE. And the collaborative aspect doesn't apear to be an open standard you can use with different software packages.
  
  E2EE would be nice, but what's your idea of open standard for collaboration as opposed to simply open source?
  If we had multiple software solutions implementing the same ways of collaborating what would be gained / in what ways would they differentiate and still remain compatible?
  
  Our comments right here on the Fediverse, are a good example.
  Lemmy, Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, and numerous others, all use the same open communication standard; Offering very different services and experiences.
- Exactly. At this point idk why anyone bothers migrating to things that are not backed by open standards. The price of vendor lock-in always comes.
  
  Until I can easily export the data, where is the vendor lock?
  Vendor lock means that migrating away has significant cost or technical challenges.
  Take this case: documents saved are first of all easily downloadable from drive (in bulk), and also exportable in markdown.
  They change pricing/add features that I don't want/sell off the company (hard now that it's managed by a nonprofit but still) etc.? I make a nice bulk download and move everything in whatever other system I want. I can do the same for contacts, email (I use my own domains) and calendar. Basically, 1h + the time to download files and I am moved to another provider.
  Can you elaborate in what you think the vendor lock looks like?
- I want Proton to replace Google. I wish for that. And during this time we can use open source software as well

73 comments