On 3-4-2009 23:08, nemesis wrote:
> andrel escreveu:
>> 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?
> 
> Blender started life as an in-house, proprietary tool.  When the company 
> was closing doors, they realized the tool was quite complete and good 
> enough perhaps not for going commercial, but at least to serve as the 
> basis for an open-source project.  And so they realized an online 
> auction and when a certain ammount was gathered, they did release the 
> source under the GPL.
> 
> The community literally bought a former proprietary product and 
> open-sourced it.  Even Stallman gone hurrah. :)

What I remember is that it started as a research project (at which stage 
it may have been available for others, so that is why I though it might 
qualify as an answer), was then tried commercially and when that did not 
work converted to open source by the main developer.
The reason that it did not work may be related to being forced to do 
(more than) full time 'maintenance' and 'support' because people were 
paying.
That danger is why our software is available to fellow researchers for 
free. We would like to do some research ourselves too.

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