Comparison of Open Source and Closed Source - Innovation

Innovation

Gary Hamel counters this claim by saying that quantifying who or what is innovative is impossible.

The implementation of compatible FOSS replacements for proprietary software is encouraged by the Free Software Foundation to make it possible for their users to use FOSS instead of proprietary software, for example they have been listed GNU Octave, an API-compatible replacement for MATLAB, as one of their high priority projects, in the past this list contained free binary compatible Java and CLI implementations, like GNU Classpath and DotGNU. Thus even “derivative” developments are important in the opinion of many people from FOSS. However, there is no quantitative analysis, if FOSS is less innovative than proprietary software, since there are derivative/reimplementing proprietary developments, too.

Some of the largest well-known FOSS projects are either legacy code (e.g., FreeBSD or Apache) developed a long time ago independently of the free software movement, or by companies like Netscape (which open-sourced its code with the hope that they can compete better), or by companies like MySQL which use FOSS to lure customers for its more expensive licensed product. However, it is notable that most of these projects have seen major or even complete rewrites (in the case of the Mozilla and Apache 2 code, for example) and do not contain much of the original code.

Innovations have come, and continue to come, from the open-source world:

• GmailFS is a good example of the collaborative nature of much open-source development. Building on FUSE (which allows filesystems to be implemented in userspace, instead of as code that needs to be loaded into the kernel) combined with libgmail, which is a Python library for programmatic access to a user's Gmail message store, the result is the ability to use the multiple gigabytes of Gmail message space as a fileserver accessible from anywhere on the Internet.
• Perl, the pioneering open-source scripting language, made popular many features, like regular expressions and associative arrays, that were unusual at the time. The newer Python language continues this innovation, with features like functional constructs and class-dictionary unification.
• dcraw is an open-source tool for decoding RAW-format images from a variety of digital cameras, which can produce better images than the closed-source tools provided by the camera vendors themselves.
• A number of laptop models are available with a particular emphasis on multimedia capabilities. While these invariably come preinstalled with a copy of Microsoft Windows, some of them also offer an alternative "fast-boot" mode (such as Phoenix HyperSpace) based on GNU/Linux. This gets around the long time it can take to boot up Windows.
• VLC media player, Songbird, and Amarok are FOSS music players that integrate internet-based data sources to an unprecedented degree, taking song information from MusicBrainz, related track information from last.fm, album cover art from amazon.com and displaying an artist's Wikipedia page within the player.
• While admittedly inspired by Mac OS X's Quartz graphics layer, Compiz Fusion has pioneered the concept of "plug in" window decorators and animation effects. Users can develop their own creative and unique effects.
• Open-source telecommunication products, such as the Asterisk PBX, have revolutionized the ICT industry.
• There are substantial efforts towards the implementation of a semantic desktop in FOSS communities.
• Today's desktop environments are innovating regarding their unique idea of a Social Desktop.
• Many academic research projects release their results as FOSS.