Please, this is not a troll. It's a serious question that isn't meant to 
imply the answer is "no."

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?

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 ;-)?

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   There's no CD like OCD, there's no CD I knoooow!

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