Ties collaboration to local operation and durable ownership.
Cloud apps gave people collaboration and took away ownership. The files live on someone else's server, the software stops working when the company does, and the network is on the critical path of every keystroke.
The paper sets out seven ideals for getting the collaboration without the trade: fast, works on several devices, works offline, collaborative, outlives the vendor, private, and under the user's control.
CRDTs are the technology that makes it reachable, by letting two copies of a document be edited concurrently and merged without a server deciding who won. The authors score existing approaches against the seven and find most of them short.