"All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?"

Also, the writer of the article worked on google wave.

I am not attacking formalism by the way. All of OT is basically "if these have x properties then we can do y" so I understand it is necessary. But author claims he invented a new flavor of "patch theory" but I can't see anything new here. Most of it is a standard intro on how operational transformations work except using category theory terminology.

Would like to know for example how his choice of edit operations and requirement of properties compare with let's say share.js's: http//github.com/ottypes/docs (which was also written by an ex-google wave intern). Explaining the subtle differences between OT implementations and what new advantages his theory brings is more interesting IMO.

I don't think the author claims they found something groundbreakingly new. In fact just the references contain all the points Liam makes.

Patches-vector seems to be different to ottypes for example in that ottypes have predicted what types you would want to synchronize and provides you a correspondig OT type for each of them. What if I want to synchronize binary data or javascript objects or some other weird thing? If equality is defined for my object the library shouldn't need to make any other assumptions.

Besides this practicality though, I think the whole point of the article is that one can mathematically reason about patches-vector.