On 3-4-2009 18:40, Darren New wrote:
> Please, this is not a troll. It's a serious question that isn't meant to 
> imply the answer is "no."

'No' would be a strange answer to your question anyway.

> What are some other cool open-source projects that didn't take their 
> design from existing products?  I.e., ones where the open source 
> software was the first thing to do things that way?

POV and Blender?

> The ones I can think of offhand are Ruby, Python, CouchDB, maybe VFS 
> file system, Singularity (if you count that as open source)...  I think 
> there was another cool large-scale database system I'm forgetting, and 
> probably a PL or two...
> 
> I don't count the Linux kernel, GNOME or KDE, Emacs, GCC, MySQL, Hadoop, 
> etc., because all these things look and act (from the outside) 
> significantly like that which they're based on. While some of the stuff 
> the "cloud" folks are doing is very cool, I don't think it counts as 
> Open Source.
> 
> Any other innovative languages, databases, etc? Something that one could 
> learn cool new ideas from by just reading the documentation (assuming 
> documentation exists ;-)?

Check out the works of Don Knuth. E.g. TeX and Metafont are fully 
documented and source is available as books.

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