Guest post by InfoWorld’s Neil McAllister takes on the old saw that open source doesn’t innovate, highlighting seven innovative new ideas in software that you may be able to buy from proprietary vendors some day, but that you can only get for free from the open source community today. “Proprietary software vendors would have you believe that the open source movement has produced nothing but knockoffs of existing products and cast-off code that couldn’t cut it in the free market,” McAllister writes, “The open source movement remains a font of innovation to this day, and not just in the commercial sector. Numerous projects founded by universities, loosely knit communities, and individuals are exploring areas yet to be taken on by mainstream, proprietary software products.”
This is one of those stupid top X articles, that make you click through a slideshow to generate pageviews. The content is not that exciting.
Especially the claim in the introduction about being not commercial or mainstream. But the only two interesting projects are by Mozilla and KDE.
Save your time and skip thia article. It can’t keep its promise.
Heh, I agree with you there. I didn’t even bother going through the article, I never bother with articles divided into tiny pages. This is the internet, for crying out loud, not a bloody printed magazine.
What more none of them are innovations! Seriously only truly innovative thing was Ksplice but I think even that wasn’t truly new thing. Most innovative stuff isn’t ready products, they are tech demos or research projects. I’m pretty sure there is those but failure to show them publicly isn’t helping nor does these idiotic articles. Point is to accomplish something new not redo something old with different technique. And yes horrible site I wish you never linked there.
If this is supposed to be the cream of the crop in Open Source Innovation… Then I think we can stand by the idea Open Source isn’t really a good method for innovation…
Granted Inovation is really overused. When we hear it we want to think of something ground breaking and not incremental. However these are fairly lame. Sure some of it is kinda cool and I would say yes they are innovative however compared to what the closed source guys Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, Google come out. This list was quite lame.
As with everything, there are pearls in the opensource world (for example, apache or x264
) and there are the lowlifes (such as the n-th f’ing clone of iTunes). Nothing new to see here, move along….
Is it hidden under some onions? Maybe under the lettuce, or tomato? Or, there’s a 1mm slice of it in a link, and…WTF, the article is a summary of articles, linking to those articles.
So, you didn’t even link to the actual content…but then the actual content is a slideshow on a cluttered site, and to top that off, what I see in the slideshow thumbnails is mostly the common me-too crap that gives FOSS that no-innovation reputation, anyway.
You know, I’ve never read InfoWorld, before. I won’t again, either.
but true, the linked article didn’t live up to my expectations after reading the bombastic introduction McAllister wrote.
I discovered a few things but indeed, besides KSplice and Bespin, I haven’t been impressed by the “innovative new ideas”.
Meh, rather so-so, and LLVM is missing from the line up which is pretty innovative if you ask me.
It’s a compiler (a very good one, I admit), how exactly is that innovative?
Umm, have you looked at the new approaches to compiler design? sorry if you’re expecting a project to be jumping out of the cake naked every 2 weeks with “we have something new and innovative! ye ha!”
Who exactly said that open source doesn’t innovate? Anyway, I’m surprised that BitTorrent isn’t on the list. Isn’t that open source?
I don’t think anyone stated that Open Source didn’t innovate… However this list seem to prove the common idea that Open Source stuff isn’t as innovative on what a full company can product. Most on this stuff on the list was kinda a yea it is kinda neat… vs. a wow this is really cool.