I came here to say the same thing. This project is quite old (over 5 years old according to some of the commits). I would expect a little more polish for something that has been around for so long.
It's actually older. I remember using this in 2007 to write lecture notes in LaTeX in collaboration with a friend (our notebooks being connected by Ethernet since the university did not have WiFi back in the days).
The author's previous iteration of a library for multi-user text editing was called libobby, so that it'd be manually linked with -lobby. It might have been named some time after reading about libiberty and the like. Naturally, the Gtk GUI app had to have a G prepended to that, and the name was kept even though libobby was dropped in favor of a new, C-based library implementing a more complete algorithm with a slightly less gimmicky name.
That's the thing with languages. Laura means penis in Hindi (or the tip of it), and it's kind of a proper word, not just a slang. Randi means prostitute, another proper word. These are the names people must have chosen for their children at some point.
So people usually just pick a name that is not a slang or offensive or heavily inappropriate in the languages, cultures known to them.
UK slang, in some regions at least, for someone who talks a lot, perhaps when they ought not, thus usually somewhat in pejoration - "She's a right gobby cow, she is."
I've definitely heard of someone having the "gift of the gab", meaning they speak convincingly (I think I've only heard it used to describe sales people though).
"gift of the gab" can be positive, meaning a confident successful communicator (and sometimes socialiser) though tone of voice can turn it negative, meaning someone who successfully communicates bullshit (got instance in a marketing context).
Gobby is pretty much always negative, meaning loud, never shutting up, often also implying overly opinionated and/or obnoxious.
gobby was/is the testbed editor for the protocol originally called obby (now infinote). As many GNOME based applications of the time, names where usually prefixed with a 'g', hence gobby.
The Ubuntu Developers Summit used to use Gobby for collaborative notes and it served it reasonably well with hundreds of concurrent connections.. but it did crash on occasion. However, it did later move to Etherpad (Java based).. and then Etherpad Lite (nodejs based).
gobby may not be the best editor out there, but as far as I know it's goal was to be a testbed/implementation of the obby (now infinote [1]) collaborative editing protocol. The underlying library is quite easy to use and integrate into existing editors, for example I once implemented a gedit plugin [2] which used libinfinity to add collaborative editing to gedit although it has since gone stale.
The use case is synchronous editing. I've used gobby e.g. for writing minutes during a meeting. Everyone was logged in and could see/edit the current state. Very useful when dealing with dense/complex topics because this way misunderstandings etc. get corrected instantaneously.
