Innovation in Open Source Software? 88
ndogg asks: "Many have said that there is a lack of innovation in OSS software, and tend to talk about the big projects, like Mozilla and the Linux kernel. However, I would contend that innovation is quite abound in OSS, but that the problem is the spotlight is rarely shown upon those projects that are truly innovative. For example, I would contend that Data Display Debugger (DDD) and The Boost C++ Libraries are quite unique and innovative projects. What OSS projects do you feel are innovative, but underapreciated?"
I nominate ZeroConf (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a much better example than those given. (Score:1, Flamebait)
Re:This is a much better example than those given. (Score:3, Insightful)
You can have an innovative stone block bridge design. You know, the same things the Romans built 2000 years ago. You can still innovate on them.
innovation
n.
Innovation inside of the VM subsystem of the kernel happens. It's esoteric and 99% of all people don't care, know
it's not an Apple idea (Score:2)
The obstacle to widespread adoption of such technologies has traditionally been standards and compatibility; since Apple can get away with doing its own thing more than other vendors, they often push such technologies into the market even if they weren't the ones to actually invent it.
Well, they're submitting it to the IETF (Score:2)
It seems strange for a company to submit a standard they didn't work on, doesn't it?
Re:Well, they're submitting it to the IETF (Score:2)
It is wrong to say that "Apple is submitting it", as if Apple developed the whole thing and then is handing a finished document to IETF. The ZeroConf working group itself has been around since 1999 and the specification was written by people from Apple, Sun, and Microsoft. Go look at the IETF working group instead of Apple's marketing materials; Apple loves to embellish what they are doing ("the world's most advanced ope
Re:Well, they're submitting it to the IETF (Score:2)
You impugn Apple (rightly or wrongly doesn't matter) for the subjective flaw of being hyperbolic. You then make statements without defining or defending them.
Here's a 'trusted' source, O'Reilly:
ZeroConf [oreillynet.com] doesn't seem to be a Microsoft thing. Or a Sun thing; and that only later did Sun (and IBM) start supporting it.
O'Reilly says Sun has their own Jini thing and Microsoft UPnP; and UPnP. As for first implementations, Apple rolled it out into their OS in Jaguar, O
Re:it's not an Apple idea (Score:2)
Because you are right, there were similar previous technologies, like AppleTalk!
Extensions around Firefox browser (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Extensions around Firefox browser (Score:2)
for a long time, and firefox didn't invent the web, nothing new. Sure Firefox has some nice bits here and there, by all means, but very innovative ? No.
Bittorrent, that's somewhat innovative.
So is perhaps the Speex codec.
In the somewhat same area
This [bell-labs.com]
and that [paulgraham.com]
are interresting reads
Mosaic then (Score:2, Informative)
However, Mozilla and Firefox do have a lot of improvements over Mosaic and are innovative in their own right.
Re:Extensions around Firefox browser (Score:2)
What's innovative about that ? It's a browser. People have done browsers for a long time, and firefox didn't invent the web, nothing new.
Innovation impact tends to be misjudged, but historical gauges can be more accurate.
[Back in 1992] "Feh! What's this port 80 service people are talking about? It's just another TCP/IP application ferchrissakes! I've developed GUI applications for years that are a lot more useful than this Mosaic!"
I'm certain that some of the incremental improvements I enjoy today will
Re:Extensions around Firefox browser (Score:2)
Re:Extensions around Firefox browser (Score:2)
I thought one of IE's problems is that installing "extensions" is *too* easy... :)
Synaptic (Score:2)
How many similar programs exist on Windows or Mac? It updates installed packages and allows new packages to be installed, whilst resolving dependencies...
http://heidelberg.freshrpms.net/rpm.html?id=919 [freshrpms.net]
Re:Synaptic (Score:1, Flamebait)
Windows and Mac OS X both have similar installer and update functionality. The difference is that they are both more stable platforms (in terms of whether or not certain packages are available) -- you don't need the same kind of dependency management that you need with Linux.
I'm not saying Synaptic isn't cool (I wouldn't know), just that it's not a poi
Re:Synaptic (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Synaptic (Score:4, Insightful)
Is that a good thing though? Maybe you're missing the point. I haven't used OS X so I can't comment on it. I also haven't used Synaptic on Fedora -- I have, however, used Synaptic (and even more often, apt, which Synaptic is a front-end for) on Debian.
Windows Update updates windows, and possibly some other MS applications. The apt repository on my debian workstation has about 18,000 packages available to install. A lot of these packages are libraries, etc, but there are also quite a few applications.
The power of having a shared system of libraries, however, is that updates are automatic. If you're using, say, libssl, to make connections to servers, and there is a flaw or security hole in it, as the application developer, you don't have to do anything really. Once libssl is updated, your application is updated, and that's that. If anything, the next time you release your app, you specifically depend on >= the updated version of libssl. The other benefit is when a developer effectively abandons a package - it can still get updates, if there are problems with libraries it uses.
Contrast this to Windows. Since there are not really any central libraries, each application has to bundle its own - which means that the developer is responsible for updating their package to release the new version of the library. Obviously any core packages to Windows will get updated by MS eventually, but there are also a lot of 3rd party libraries in use. Some applications even put their dll files in the Windows directory, and while that would normally be a good idea, there's too many developers that don't play nice, and require a specific version (their app breaks when another updates), or install an old version and break other apps.
Sure this could be fixed, but all it takes is one developer to not adhere to the rules. On Debian, this is handled by the apt team - if an app doesn't play nice, it won't meet the requirments to get into the repository. Microsoft could do something similar with Windows Update, but I have a feeling that would end up where code signing has ended up - MS charging lots of money, and no developers will to pay for little perceived value.
Re:Synaptic (Score:2)
On Windows, yeah, they can only install or patch Microsoft's products and libraries. On Mac OS X, they can only support Apple's products (including things like libssl).
If you're running Debian, most if not all of your installed software will come from Debian's repositories (or Gentoo, FreeBSD
Re:Synaptic (Score:2)
Re:Synaptic (Score:2, Insightful)
It would just provide a level playing field.
It would be possible on a proprietary system to have all software installed via something similar to apt and have the installer add more locations to search. Then you could update everything in one pla
Re:Synaptic (Score:2)
I frequently encounter dependency problems under Windows. Unfortunately, they usually show up as odd behavior in seemingly unrelated software after a new app is installed. With RPM, DEB, and other dependency tracking package syste
Re:Synaptic (Score:1)
Re:Synaptic (Score:2)
My point was that Synaptic is just a front-end to an implementation of an idea -- the idea being the real innovation.
Unfortunately, as soon as an idiot moderator slaps that Flamebait label on you, people feel free to flame you.
apt-get like systems just isn't possible in proprietary systems, that's why windows update et. al. sucks.
If you read my other comment, [slashdot.org] you'll see that I talk about exactly this. In fact, I say pretty much the exact same thing you are.
Tell me
Re:Synaptic (Score:2)
Others that deserve to be mentioned are Live-CDs/Knoppix, Wiki and Ogg Vorbis.
opengl (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:opengl (Score:3, Informative)
The innovation is to produce unencumbered versions (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The innovation is to produce unencumbered versi (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The innovation is to produce unencumbered versi (Score:2, Insightful)
At th
Subversion! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Subversion! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Subversion! (Score:1)
--
lds
Re:Subversion! (Score:1)
Re:Subversion! (Score:3, Interesting)
Wow, least insightful comment ever...
Subversion is trying, but it's at best a footnote right now; CVS firmly rules the roost (despite all it's problems).
Morever, Subversion isn't particularly innovative -- indeed, their stated goal is to provide a conservative update to CVS (getting rid of CVS's more annoying problems while keeping the same basic model)!
If you want a truly innovative free-software source-cont
Re:Subversion! (Score:2)
I'm not quite sure why you think distributed version control is innovative - the idea has been reimplemented a half dozen times, including Larry's BitKeeper - but I'd add SVK to the list. SVK is also open source but doesn't suffer from the "hard to solve problems need hard to use tools" syndrome of Arch.
Re:Subversion! (Score:1)
Re:Subversion! (Score:2)
Have you completely lost your mind? Subversion has only been stable for a couple of years. I'm damned sure there was a ton of collaborative OSS before svn; Linux and Mozilla are two that just come to mind, but there a zillion others.
Bittorrent (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bittorrent (Score:2)
I second this. BitTorrent is absolutely brill. I think it's so cool that, as more people start downloading the latest LiveCD for their fave distro, all of a sudden the network becomes more efficient, not less. That totally reverses the way things supposedly should be.
(Of course, I realise that the BitTorrent idea doesn't totally reverse the 'more clients, slower download' thing -- I've seen some pretty slow trackers, which are of course the point-of-failure for a torrent -- but I'm sure it's many times che
Re:Bittorrent (Score:2)
Bittorrent did it easier and (most significantly I think) at the right time. (Which was about 2 years after Swarmcast.)
I think the basic parts of Swarmcast was OSS. I know that I downloaded the source from them at least.
iRate (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:iRate (Score:3, Interesting)
Agreed -- iRate is fantastic. [sourceforge.net] While there are some garbage 'samples' on the list, there are very few. Out of 1,000 songs I've only encountered 27 (just purged that many just now).
I would never have found these gems if it weren't for iRate; Kade Puckett (Backwoods), Nimbus (Twist), Beds for Sleeping Kites (I was starting to believe), Beth Quist (most), Norine Braun (most), Seismic Anamoly (many), MISS (Head Not Found),
I nominate the LiveCD (Score:5, Interesting)
blogging? (Score:2)
RSS/Atom though not really open-source was born in the OSS community.
musicbrainz is a cool project to match songs to data based upon acoustic modeling -- not well-known but definitely innovative
reiserFS is OSS, and though I'm not the authority on the subject, it's supposedly got some really neat stuff goin on for i
Re:blogging? (Score:2)
I'm probably not more knowledgeable, but I'll comment anyway :-)
Yeah, Reiser4 is good stuff. Even Reiser3 is much better than NTFS. It's fast and doesn't need to be defragmented. Unfortunately, Reiser4 is so "innovative" that it requires significant changes to the Linux kernel just to work, which is one reason why it's not ye
Re:blogging? (Score:1)
If Linux is going to become mainstream on the desktop then working alternatives to Microsoft software HAVE to be in place. Joe Bloggs wants to have the software he knows (or at least something with the exactly the same functionality) and is probably too set in his ways to be bothered to experiment.
Maybe once firmly established o
Death by Double Clicking (Score:2)
What's worse, the data displays don't persist! They're supposed to, but it's been buggy for years. Once you finally get DDD to display your linked list in a semi-readable format (no mean feat; it involves a lot of scrollin
Feel free (Score:1)
Re:Feel free (Score:1)
Re:Just because it's open source (Score:2)
zerg (Score:3, Interesting)
Still, even if the stuff is over a year old, it's still interesting...
httpd, tex (Score:3, Interesting)
TeX -- Knuth basically invented desktop publishing (including scalable fonts) decades before Adobe made it commercial.
Re:httpd, tex (Score:3, Insightful)
1978 Knuth starts work TeX and releases the first version
1982 Geshke and Warnock leave Xerox and form Adobe a company designed to take the ideas of postscript commercial
1984 Adobe release Postscript level 1
1985 Postscript laser printers hit the market this includes image setting
1986 Adobe releases postscript fonts
1989 Knuth finish TeX
Seems to me they came out at the same time driven by similar issues with different target markets
Dasher (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems innovative to me.
I would make the point that innovative does not equal successful. In today's winner takes all world, the term innovative often seems to be restricted to successful innovations. Unsuccessful innovations are valuable though, as they rule out things which don't work.
Off the top of my head... (Score:2)
Stateless Linux -- RedHat's new method of keeping systems up-to-date and tamper-resistant
Don't forget the early "open source" projects (Score:5, Insightful)
Much of the Internet runs on software that was open source in some way early on -- such as bind, sendmail, perl, the original web browser (Mosaic), and so on. How many of the "backbone of the Internet" common RFC's have been implemented in open source from the get go?
Don't forget code from DECUS and other such collaborative projects.
Many of the open source projects that people are most familiar with (because it's software they interact with in an obvious way) may seem like a "copy of an existing closed source project," but under the hood there is a lot of innovate software that quietly runs things. Also don't forget that much of what open source is said to copy is software concepts that started out open before the commercial world threw money at it (think, Internet Explorer).
Keep in mind that the amount of software the average user encounters in an obvious way is not huge. It's things like the windowing system and an office suite and a browser, plus some other apps.
When open source or academics or other groups come up with something new and innovative, the commercial companies very often copy it themselves. People who come along later and don't know the history might look at later open source projects and say that they are just implementing what commercial companies have implemented.
For AV Geeks, er Home Theater Owners (Score:4, Informative)
FFDSHOW [sourceforge.net] - a top-notch xvid decoder, but more importantly also real-time high-quality video "manipulator" including scaling, transformations, noise removal, subtitling, color correction, macro-deblocking, etc - the list is huge. Play your DVDs through FFDSHOW with the right settings and the good ones start to look almost like HDTV. I don't know of any one proprietary product, or even group of products, that comes close to this level of functionality.
dScaler [sourceforge.net] a very high-quality video de-interlacer for both live and batch processing
DRC [freshmeat.net] - digital room correction and BurteFIR [ludd.luth.se] an audio convolver - together they are able to turn your $100 cheap-ass stereo system into something comparable to a $5K-$10K setup. (Ok, there is expensive hardware out there to do something similar, but no software, proprietary or otherwise)
Plenty of innovation (Score:2, Interesting)
It seems to me like innovative and experimental software is very commonplace in OSS. Unfortunately, a lot of it doesn't get noticed as it is never rolled into a "usable" product. Tempest [erikyyy.de], a radio broadcaster using CRT, is a good example.
Another obvious place where OSS seems to innovate is in low level networking programs. Ettercap [sf.net] is absolutely brilliant, for instance, and Ethereal [ethereal.com] is exceedingly useful as well. Perhaps these were created in part because they were necessary to write compatible higher
Re:Plenty of innovation (Score:2)
tcpdump might have been innovative back in the day, I'm not sure.
Big projects don't innovate. (Score:2, Insightful)
Not that there is any shame in making the most of other people's good ideas:
One of the most direct advantages Free Software has is tha
Look on the bleeding-edge... (Score:2)
freenet, for being the first attempt at a truly anit-censorship, anti-monitoring network.
And, in a more practical sense, most "new" features of MS products have been in open source for years before we even hear of the possibili
DDD? (Score:1)
grip and digital dj beat itunes to the punch (Score:3, Interesting)
MediaWiki and Lilypond (Score:1)
MediaWiki is Wikipedia's kickass wiki implementation that has tons of cool features. Wiki was around before MediaWiki, sure, but MW pretty much sets the bar. And of course it powers Wikpedia and all of its sister projects, which are pretty amazing and innovative too.
GNU Lilypond is a music typesetter that aims to produce beautiful sheet music. This is cool because most computer-printed scores look like crap. Lilypond gets flak because it
ddd? (Score:2)
innovative software often starts out open source (Score:2)
The usual path for so
GPL (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:GPL (Score:1)
It's code that was written once, is barely updated and was copied millions of times and s
Re:GPL (Score:1)
The modern car is so complex that no single person can fix them.
Comertial software today is largly the same, it's nice to have Sun come down here and identify the problem and get the entire Solaris team to work and fix bugs.
I'm not arguing against OSS, I'm just saying that in most cases comertial software is more than adequate, and
sweetcode.org catalog (Score:1)
Maybe a different definition... (Score:2, Insightful)
DDD was done 15+ years ago with CodeCenter/ObjectCenter. Boost looks a lot like RogueWave libraries.
Most OSS projects are playing catchup with some product in the commerical world, innovation is hard to find. A couple that come to mind are Struts and Cocoon. Both of these frameworks where different from any other web framework, at the time.
LyX - What You See Is What You Mean (Score:3, Interesting)
Available at http://www.lyx.org
excellent explanation as to why here:
http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html
William
Darcs (Score:2)
Dashboard (Score:2)