Linked by David Adams on Tue 28th Oct 2008 16:14 UTC, submitted by M-Saunders
Free Software/open source often gets a bad rap for innovating. It just rips-off the work of commercial developers, right? Not so, as this Linux Format piece argues. FLOSS has pioneered, or been a catalyst in, some notable changes in the computing world. Several of these innovations are OS-related.
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Member since:2007-01-22
For genuine 3D desktop things that are open source, there's Sun's Project Looking Glass, and Squeak's Croquet project.
If one wants to come up with innovation from FLOSS, you're going to have to do much better than that little list.
well there you go.
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2006-01-16
Holy cow. Did Microsoft write this? This is so inaccurate it could have come from their marketing department.
1) 3D Desktops
Compiz Fusion gives you 3D eye candy, not a 3D desktop. The 3D spinning cube pictured was copied from Mac OS X... Besides, Silicon Graphics were doing things more along the lines of a genuine 3D desktop about 2 decades ago, and I'm pretty certain that wasn't open source.
For genuine 3D desktop things that are open source, there's Sun's Project Looking Glass, and Squeak's Croquet project.
2) Live CDs
Don't make me laugh. This is just a re-invention of floppy boot disks. People used to craft fully bootable Windows 3 floppies. Every version of Mac OS supplied on a CD was a Live CD... This is not innovation.
3) Wikis
The concept isn't new. Ted Nelson did a bunch of work on this decades ago. Collaborative document editing has been around for an incredibly long time, in proprietary and commercial forms. Tim Berners-Lee's original web was effectively a Wiki.
4) VNC
VNC is a remote desktop protocol... Timbuktu on the Mac was doing that in the late 80s, pre-dating VNC by nearly a decade, and indeed pre-dating Linux too for that matter.
If one wants to come up with innovation from FLOSS, you're going to have to do much better than that little list.