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?"

Extensions around Firefox browser

[prostoalex]

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 [pcmag.com] to see what the other folks are using.

opengl

[voot]

opengl!, seriously its a huge project and its to bad that it lost momentum

iRate

[leonbrooks]

The whole idea [sf.net] is a good one, and there's no company nickel-and-diming it to death.

I nominate the LiveCD

[kbielefe]

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.

zerg

[Lord Omlette]

There used to be a site for exactly this sort of thing called sweetcode [sweetcode.org], but the wankers have stopped updating...

Still, even if the stuff is over a year old, it's still interesting...

httpd, tex

[bcrowell]

NCSA HTTPd [wikipedia.org] (or whatever Berners-Lee called the earliest version that embodied his vision of the www for the first time -- in any case, it was all an open-source enterprise from the start)

TeX -- Knuth basically invented desktop publishing (including scalable fonts) decades before Adobe made it commercial.

Re:Subversion!

[macshit]

There wouldn't even be much OSS (at least collaborative) without svn... OK, there is CVS but...

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-control-system, check out GNU Arch [gnuarch.org] or Darcs [scannedinavian.org].

Re:iRate

[Spoing]

1. The whole idea is a good one, and there's no company nickel-and-diming it to death.

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), Electric Franenstein (Coolest Little Monster), Ehren Starks (many), Jeff Wahl (many), Shannon Campbell (Dreaming of Violets), ... let alone ones I would have likely stumbled on later such as Horton's Choice (Oxygen and many more), Sleater Kinney (Oh), ... .

Yes, you can get these songs elsewhere...though iRate will help you get music you like from places you might not be looking. Many of the artists also sell high quality versions of the same songs that are on iRate -- so you're not stuck with 128bit MP3s if you want to get a better copy.

Plenty of innovation

[Noah Adler]

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 level software to interoperate with other systems. Also, their internationally developed and non-profit nature might make their authors more likely to tread into "legally questionable" territory than a commercial venture would dare.

Despite the relative lack quality Linux-based music and audio software, there are definitely some innovative tools in this area as well, such as Csound [csounds.com], SuperCollider [sourceforge.net], and TaoSynth [ukonline.co.uk], which provide very interesting programmatic sound modeling possibilities. These programs wouldn't be generally useful to musicians, which is perhaps why they haven't been developed as closed-source commercial products, but for the somewhat rare musician-hackers out there, they're very interesting indeed.

There's plenty of innovation in open source. The only thing is, most of it is so niche that it's hard to hear of it.

grip and digital dj beat itunes to the punch

[luge]

Now, grip and digital dj were not exactly the easiest programs in the world to use, but they had the idea for audio CD->ripping->music management database in late 1998- itunes didn't 'innovate' the same idea for two more years, in January of 2001.

LyX - What You See Is What You Mean

[WillAdams]

as opposed to WYSIWYG.

Available at http://www.lyx.org

excellent explanation as to why here:

http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html

William