Songbird isn’t innovating? The integrated browser, totally themeable, the ability to search for concert tickets for a band right from your media player? Yeah, this sounds exactly like an iTunes clone to me.

Do some research next time before you make such bold claims.

I suppose he was angry that the point he was trying to make was shot down. Happens.

*Centralized software package management that makes it possible to update all software on the system through one interface

*Central software repositories ensuring a big catalog of safe free software only a mouse click away.

*Said software installable without the constant Next>Next>Next>Next>Finish installers that are so prevalent on windows systems

*Multiple virtual workspaces

*Sloppy mouse focus (Enables you to scroll text in an unfocused window

*Compiz (Builds on the initial work done in OS X but goes far beyond it)

*Dock launchers that make sense (Also Stacks before Apple did it)

*Plugin frameworks for damn near any application. (It’s only recently that this has become common on windows outside of development software)

*Hosting several domains on the same physical machine (Apache did it first)

*TCP/IP (You know that thing that the entire Internet uses to communicate)

I could go on. What I’m trying to say is that a lot of things that you think are copying commercial software is actually the other way around. There is a ton of innovation going on in free software today. But you selected a few non representative projects that supported whatever agenda you had in writing this post.

If you want innovation, you can either pay for it or create it, and FOSS makes it possible for those who create to share with the world. Innovation is inevitable as a project proceeds (unless it dies which even happens in the proprietary world), and FOSS can and has certainly pushed innovation into the proprietary software world, but only after reproducing the SAME functionality that the competing proprietary software had (nobody would care about tabs in browsers if the browser didn’t support plugins, javascript, forms, etc.).

Finally, lets not forget that Open Source means that the end user can (and often does) modify the code to meet their needs (yes, innovate). Let’s say you need an innovative feature that doesn’t exist in Nero. You can either write a letter to Nero (good luck with getting them to listen) and then pay them for their new release a few years down the road when/if they incorporate your idea, you can do without the feature, or you can create your own patches to an existing open source project and even provide the updates to the upstream developer for general inclusion.

So yes, the apps you mentioned are clones, but they still have value to many and occasionally a new light glimmers from them which improves both Open Soruce and proprietary software alike.

– Jeff