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Open Source Software has always gotten a bad rap for lacking innovation and simply copying off of propriatary applications. This has mostly been F.U.D. spread by Microsoft and in turn by less-than-informed tech journalists. I would argue that OSS can, and does, innovate as much or more than their propriatary counterparts.

An industry mag I get at work recently had a showcase on a new app by Intellext called Watson 2.0. They lauded it as new and innovative, which in some regards is true I guess. The thing that struck me though is that Watson 2.0 seems a lot like an app that Nat Friedman was working on called Dashboard. Well, maybe this wan’t such a great example since Dashboard was never really released and development seems to have been passed over in favor of Beagle. Official release or not it was innovative none-the-less.

Or how about webservices…the “big” new thing about Windows Vista and IE7 is supposed to be RSS support. Firefox was one of the first web browsers to support RSS with Live Bookmarks. KDE has also done a lot of work on integrating webservices such as Wikipedia right into many of their applications.

I would also probably include BitTorrent on the list. Maybe even Rsync? Oddly enough I have read that Microsoft is planning on releasing applications in future releases of Windows that practically mirror the functionalty of both of these apps (I bet once Microsoft re-releases BitTorrent and Rsync they will be innovative!).

Several other projects of notable mention might be ReiserFS 4, Xen, the KDE Plasma Project

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 9th, 2005 at 7:19 pm and is filed under Linux. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.