[rescue] NeWS

[Mike Meredith]

On Sat, 21 Jan 2006 18:57:46 -0700, Richard wrote:
> In a nutshell, that's my whole critique of the open source movement.
> (And I say this having released and contributed on open source
> software.)  They are imitating, not innovating.

Most software imitates; some software has small areas of innovation. And
I think that feature is open or closed independent. Word is hardly
innovative; Excel is just another VisiCalc clone, does Outhouse do
anything that PROFS didn't do ? (Disclaimer: I haven't used either).

> will always be laggards and not leaders.  About the only open source
> software that comes to mind that doesn't exhibit this pathology is gcc
> which has had some elements of C++ before other compilers had them.

Hmm. I'm not sure I'd pick out the implementation of C++ as an
innovation in gcc. I suspect it wasn't the first compiler to implement
it (even ignoring the Cfront stuff). If gcc has any innovation in it, it
is in the methods used to allow the same code generator to work with
multiple languages.

As to open source software that does implement something innovative,
what about :-

Dasher (new PDA input method)
Sendmail (MTA implementing various mail standards using 'macros' ...
          including Internet mail)
BIND (DNS ... Was this the first implementation?)
CERN's httpd (First open source web server software)
NCSA's Mosaic (First GUI web browser which started all the web stuff)
Project Looking Glass (the Sun one)