Slashdot Mirror
Innovation in Open Source Software?
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?"
Firefox browser by itself is pretty nice, but the barebones edition does not really offer much added value compared to IE or Opera. The extensions, however, are amazing, I sometimes browse their extensions catalog just to see what I am missing, or make sure I don't miss articles like this to see what the other folks are using.
'Nuff said
\/\/oobie
My laptop hard drive crashed (tinkling noise and all) about two years ago and I haven't bothered to replace it thanks to the wonderful invention that is Knoppix. That still amazes me.
This space intentionally left blank.
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.
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.
Speak before you think
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.
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.
How about:
FFDSHOW - 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 a very high-quality video de-interlacer for both live and batch processing
DRC - digital room correction and BurteFIR 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)
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
If there is anything that will ever be considered revolutionary it's the GPL. This liscense is the sort of thing our grandchildren will read about. I would also assert that this is still innovative, as most people who use computers don't know what it's about. It is our declaration of freedom and it deserves more attention from the media than it has gotten (none). I personally beleive the most innovative thing in OSS right now is the liscences and the people who are reading them for the first time.
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism