Open Source: Innovation or Imitation?

So what I wanted to do with this post is highlight a few FOSS applications that I use and that have no equivalent in the Windoze world. Some of these are not directly available in the MAC world either but using things like the Fink project will allow you to use them.

• There are two primary GUI desktop initiatives that are FOSS based. KDE and Gnome. KDE tends to be a bit more conventional. For several years I have been devoted to Gnome but recently I switched to KDE. I like the way applications in KDE are integrated. Everything just works so well together.
• Both of the above GUI applications feature virtual desktops. That is, you can actually have more than one desktop which can have different applications open in them. I believe there are some ways to get this on Windoze by using some FOSS apps. You could also run X Windows by compiling it via Cygwin but this capability is not supplied nativly.
• Now besides KDE and Gnome, if you just want to run a very resource light desktop, you can use a window manager alone. This does not include all the convenience of a full GUI but it may be useful on an older machine. And there are dozens of window managers to choose from.
• One of the KDE applications (which will also run on Gnome) is the Krusader project. This is a file manager that is incredible. There is nothing like this in the Windoze world that I can tell.
• The idea of a live operating system was pioneered by the Knoppix project. This is simply a whole Linux operating system which runs completely off of a CD. There are many advantages to having one of these around. Being able to boot one of these on a crashed machine is invaluable to name just one useful thing.

I am really just scratching the surface of things here. I haven't talked at all about server applications or the powerful command line shells such as Bash, or programming languages such as Python (to name just one of many). Perhaps I will revisit this in the future. But the main point I wanted to get across is that there is really tremendous innovation going on in the Open Source world which is significant even though it is evolutionary in nature for the most part.

I should mention (since I brought up the MS Patent thing at the start) that no claims of patent infringement have been shown to any FOSS project that I know of and no infringement charge has held up in court up to this time. And Microsloth has not shown any of the supposed 230 patents to anyone. They are simply making noise in the media about it.

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