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?"

Subversion!

[SD_92104]

There wouldn't even be much OSS (at least collaborative) without svn... OK, there is CVS but if you've never heard about svn you probably should check it out!

Re:Subversion!

[hey!]

Y'know, I'm waiting for somebody to find a way to use SVN as a back office for open office documents. It would rock. Voila! Instant network backup and versioning. Combine it with a graphical version browser, an email system and some kind of document routing/tracking database, and you'd have something with the power of Lotus Notes without the clunkiness.

Re:opengl

[Phleg]

OpenGL is an open standard, mandated by the OpenGL Architectural Review Board. The interesting part of OpenGL is the API, not the actual implementations (such as Mesa3D, the Linux OpenGL implementation).

For AV Geeks, er Home Theater Owners

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

How about:

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)

Mosaic then

[SgtChaireBourne]

What's innovative about that ? It's a browser. People have done browsers

NCSA Mosaic, if you're splitting hairs. It certainly was certainly innovative [com.com] by nearly any ('cept Chairman Bill's) definition of the term. BTW even the infamously poor MSIE is based on Mosaic.

However, Mozilla and Firefox do have a lot of improvements over Mosaic and are innovative in their own right.