A commenter on a blog I read said the old chestnut:Â “for the 1,257th time, someone name something new and revolutionary that’s come out of open source. Th incentive that drives creativity isn’t there. Real artists see no virtue in being starving artists.”
So I thought I would compile a list of great software projects that were built in an open-source way - i.e. not for profit, and with source that was freely shared with others.
This is just a tentative list - I’m sure there are mistakes, and please feel free to correct in the comments. Also, if you can think of other revolutionary software, please add it.
- Rails - combining the various aspects of web development into a seamless package was certainly revolutionary (to me). And it was open source from the beginning. Don’t like Rails? Django was built the same way.
- emacs - certainly open source, and was the first text editor that I know of that incorporated a programming language as part of its core functionality.
- Internet News - the servers and readers were all oen source - this was the first “Internet-scale” forum
- DNS - created by a scientist, specced via RFC and deployed freely.
- Wiki - the original WikiWikiWeb from Ward Cunningham wasn’t open source, but it was shared and available, and he (as far as I can tell) took no compensation for it
- IRC - was it open source?
- Sendmail - was it revolutionary?
- Jabber?
I look forward to your suggestions.
Emacs wasn’t the first editor with a built in programming language - I believe TECO was Turing complete, and the original host editor the the Editing macros. Still free software though.
Don’t forget the enabling technologies for many of those revolutions. Perl, Python, Ruby, TeX. The revolutionary nature of some of those may be debatable, but they enabled revolutions.
Also, before Usenet, there was UUCP based email and I find it hard to think of a single net technology that’s had a bigger effect than that.
But you missed the really, really, really big one. The World Wide Web is a free and open standard. Tim Berners-Lee released all the specs and his original source code as free software.
Comment by Piers Cawley — December 21, 2007 @ 11:55 am
“…you missed the really, really, really big one. The World Wide Web is a free and open standard”
Amen to that! They (the critics of OSS) can’t see it, any more than a fish thinks about the fact that it is water.
Comment by Walter R. Moore — December 21, 2007 @ 6:31 pm