Send an Open Source Project to COMDEX

chromatic writes "O'Reilly & Associates is working with COMDEX to create an Open Source Innovation Area. We've nominated 21 important, interesting, and useful applications. Here's your chance to vote on the six most deserving applications. Steve Mallet has more details in his weblog." There's lots of good choices for applications on the list as well. Chances are that you've used one of them at least once.

"Choose up to three projects" -- Why so hard :'(

[OneNonly]

With apps I use every day like OpenOffice.org, Gaim, SquirrelMail - and those that save me loads of time, phpMyAdmin and TightVNC it's such a hard choice!!

Now if only PHP-Nuke [phpnuke.org] was on the list - it's what has revolutionalised my life as a webmaster!!

Who is your audience?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're dealing with an office worker, OpenOffice and Evolution are good candidates. Home users would like to see XMMS, mplayer, GAIM, and SpamAssassin. Admins would be interested in Tight VNC and SpamAssassin. The creative types would want GIMP and Audacity.

As for the desktop, it might be a good idea to stick with one for all your demonstration boxes (all KDE or all GNOME) but of course mention that alternatives exist.

Slashdot poll

[mukund]

It would be nice if Slashdot ran this poll. Internet polls like this are not so useful I suppose, but still it would be cool to see how various projects rank out. The three leaders could be the chosen ones.

My choices in the O'Reilly list are Subversion, OpenOffice.org and SpamAssassin. None of these projects have known patent issues or issues with 3rd parties such as MSN, AOL, Yahoo (the related projects such as mplayer and GAIM do an *excellent* job however).

Re:Wait a minute...

[Minna Kirai]

I don't think anyone is arguing that in general open source software doesn't innovate

Um no, that's a very common refrain.

Look at Linux, Apache, OpenOffice, KDE, Mozilla...
for each of them, there is a pre-existing closed-source project that it can be called a "clone" of.

In fact, when RMS was initially starting [gnu.org] the "Free Software" movement, he explicitally declared they would clone Unix:

1. Individual programmers can contribute by writing a compatible duplicate of some Unix utility and giving it to me. For most projects, such part-time distributed work would be very hard to coordinate; the independently-written parts would not work together. But for the particular task of replacing Unix, this problem is absent. Most interface specifications are fixed by Unix compatibility. If each contribution works with the rest of Unix, it will probably work with the rest of GNU.

That seminal message suggests that cloning an existing program will be vastly easier than making a new one, because since there's little original thinking involved, the communication needs between distributed developers are much, much smaller.