Etherpad is an online word processor which allows people to concurrently edit the same document. Nice stuff which means Google got interested and bought It.

Google's initial plan, after acquiring the service, was to use Etherpad's technology within its Google wave platform and to shut down the original service entirely. Pretty mean.

Subsequently, the Etherpad code was released by Google under the Apache license a couple of days ago. The Etherpad open source project is available at Google Code. Soon after the Etherpad code was released piratepad.net launched.