Pictures: Poky, an open source mobile phone operating system
By Stefan Constantinescu on Friday, August 3rd, 2007 at 2:25 PM PST In Linux
I’m probably going to offend some folks with the following statement, but it has to be said: The majority of open source work out there is not innovative and is merely a free, usually inferior, version of what has already been done on either Windows or Mac.
Binky is the code name for version 3 of the Poky operating system. It is based on X11, GTK+ and the Matchbox Window Manager.
Honestly it looks like the result of a drunken sexcapade between Windows Mobile and Palm (NSDQ: PALM). I can’t recommend this, but it is interesting none the less to see what else is out there in the mobile space. You’re going to see more companies make Linux phones because anything to shave those last few dollars off their bill of materials yields them more profit. Take Symbian for example, rumor has is that a licence for that particular operating system runs around 6 dollars per device. Nokia (NYSE: NOK) sold 13.9 million devices running S60 in Q2 2007, that is $83.4 million dollars not going into their pocket.
Money well spent.
[Via: OS News]
[More pictures over at Linux Devices]
“The majority of open source work out there is not innovative and is merely a free, usually inferior, version of what has already been done on either Windows or Mac.”
It’s not that you’ve offended me, it’s that you are just wrong on this one!
Let’s look at a few places where Open Source was innovative, while proprietary just played catch up, shall we?
*Search Engines: Google (running on a huge army of Linux and BSD servers).
*Apple’s Cover Flow: (the idea of browsing albums by cover), present in Sun’s Project Looking Glass before CoverFlow was even written.
*Multiple Desktops: Been present in Linux since the early 90’s… Microsoft still doesn’t imlement it natively, and Mac is only now doing so in Leopard (though there are 3rd party apps available).
*Widgets: Apple’s Widgets (and whatever the comparable are called in Vista), are copies of Konfabulator… which itself is nothing but a copy and update of an Open Source project for the X Windows System called Athena.
*TCP/IPNetwork Stack: Windows lifted it, straight out of BSD, and still uses it.
*The “World Wide Web”: DARPAnet, the first real predecessor to the internet, was created (along with tools like SMTP, etc) on BSD, Open Source.
*The modern operating system era: started on UNIX, which until it was close-sourced by AT&T, was freely distributed and distributable.
*Email: going back to DARPAnet; SMTP, as mentioned, was simply an evolution of SendMail (Open Source program).
*DNS: without DNS, you’d not have http://www.intomobile.com, you’d have to remember an IP address… DNS is run on, and was created on, open source servers
*Tabbed Browsing
*Wikipedia (and Wiki software in general)
*Instant Messaging
*Plug and Play: First present in an OS in Yggdrasil Linux
*HTML
*WYSIWYG
*the Live CD
*BitTorrent
*Journaling File Systems
You get the picture. Have Microsoft and Apple innovated also? Of course! Everyone of the OS wars have innovated in one way or another.
-olly
Those are fine examples of where innovation did happen on the Linux front.
I should have structured my argument on the angle of “innovation on the desktop” where Linux frankly has none.
Please don’t link me to the hundreds of videos on youtube showing off Beryl
What about Microsoft Windows “innovation on the desktop”?
OOh, they picked blue for the screen of death!
And damn, nice list above. I was only going to throw Apache out there… and multiple desktops – that was innovation years and years ago, I need to use Virtue Desktop to have it on my Mac.
Yeah, that mobile OS is pretty ugly.
And my favorite open source project of all time, simply due to the sheer scale of the reverse engineering involved, drum roll, Samba! Thanks U of Western Aussie