Open Source Innovation
My boss asked me the other day: "Where did open source software innovate?".
I was not pleased with my answer. After all, it's hard to talk with a Microsoft acolyte.
Let's make a list.
1. The MVCC database which Postgres supports since forever and the kings of the hill have recently discovered.
2. The BSD operating system popularized TCP/IP
3. Sendmail
4. BIND
5. ping
6. BSD itself
FredBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD
7. AMQP
8. Recognition from big tenders
9. Ruby and Ruby on Rails
10. Perl
11. PHP
12. Couchdb, mongodb, hadoop, pig, hbase and the NOSQL movement
13. IETF RFC and proper implementations like qmail, djbdns and others
14. Languages to learn and earn: Haskell, Scheme, Go, Scala, Python, Erlang, Lua
15. New browsers: Mozilla Firefox, Chromium
16. The agile manifesto and software development software
17. Git, Mercurial, Fossil, Bazaar, Monotone, Subversion, ...
18. Apache HTTP server
19. The GNU project
20. Academia at large, since most open source was developed at Universities. Not anymore, for the win.
This is the first take. I should get more assertive on this subject.
