Oscar resells MagnaCare insurance, and they're not even the only ones on the NY exchange to do it. I wish they'd actually do something different in the insurance market, but Oscar is more of the same.
Judging by the chart on the site, it looks like each client polls the original model on the server, and infers changes by diffing it against the client's current copy.
Yup, I've actually read all those papers, and then some. I think OT is often misunderstood and poorly documented, and really needs a solid go-to library. (Along with clear, accessible documentation.)
ShareJS and "Operational-Transformation" (used by Firepad) are decent, but in my opinion aren't general enough and may even have some algorithmic flaws.
And yes, it's time this was solved, and it wasn't necessary to re-implement the basics for every collaborative project.
OT works naturally with linear data structures, but is tougher to use correctly with more complex data, which Mozilla seems to have here with Towtruck.
No approach to technology architecture is a "silver bullet," especially with a stack spread across client and server.
I always find myself returning to the "boring, old-fashioned" way of doing things (like server-side processing or relational databases) and these do indeed seem like the best choices for many applications.
But I don't see how this calls client-side MVC into question, except that perhaps it's considered as a default choice too often.
While looking beyond a pg_dump-style approach to backup/recovery, I was considering https://github.com/heroku/WAL-E and discovered Barman. It's also open source, and looks like a strong contender.