Amy Bruckman responds to Douglas Rushkoff

I hope Jimmy will jump in here... but on Wikipedia the opposite is true. The "Wikipedians" Andrea Forte and I interviewed feel that they are part of something important, and contributing meaningfully to it. That's why they do it!

Our animators on newgrounds feel similarly--thrilled to be contributing to Something Big. In both cases, most contributors start off not necessarily thinking of themselves as the sort that could contribute to something important. Being able to do so is empowering. And they take on gradually more significant roles over time, moving from the margin to the center of a community of practice.

*Open Source and Crowdsourcing. *
Has the open source movement created new forms, or just copies of old ones?

I asked this question of students in my research group on Friday, and a few students argued passionately that the notion that open source just recreates existing ideas is a cliché and false. Yes Linux is a new implementation of Unix, but there's a lot more going on than that. CS undergrad Matthew Flaschen made this list for us.

-- Amy

Matthew Flaschen writes:

This is partial list of what I believe are original open source
applications or features. I tried to focus on software that was related
to the internet and had no previous proprietary counterpart.

Let me know what you think.

Matt

(click on MORE tab for the list!)

Sendmail, a descendant of delivermail, was the first popular (if not the
first) implementation of SMTP, the protocol used to deliver almost all
modern email.

WorldWideWeb, Tim Berners-Lee's web browser, released in 1991 and put
into the public domain in 1993.

Modern scripting languages, especially Perl, Python, PHP, and Ruby.
When Perl was released, it not only saw quick adoption, but also created
a new kind of own subculture (JAPH).

UseModWiki, the first popular distributable wiki engine. Originally
used by Wikipedia, before they switched to MediaWiki.

The key JavaScript libraries, including Prototype, jQuery, and MooTools.

The initial implementation of the JSON data exchange language.

CouchDB, a non-relational document database implemented in Erlang (a
specialized language for concurrent programming, itself now open source)
and designed around an HTTP interface. It is meant to be easy to start
using and facilitate scaling upwards and outwards.

Hadoop, the first distributable implementation of Google's MapReduce
system (Google does not sell or make available their internal version).
This also includes the HBase non-relational database system

The Lucene search and indexing system, along with associated software
such as Solr (a search server) and Nutch (a parser and crawler system).

The original ssh (Secure Shell) implementation. Since then, the
original author's implementation has become increasingly proprietary, so
people have used OpenSSH, which descends from the original open source
version.

The distributed Jabber instant messaging protocol. The initial
implementation, jabberd, was open source, though there have since been
many other proprietary and open source implementations, including Google
Talk.

The original BitTorrent distributed file-sharing implementation.
Similar to ssh, the original author's version has become proprietary,
and a variety of other open source and proprietary implementations have
arisen.

X, the windowing system for UNIX and Linux. It provides the ability to
use graphical applications over a network, including the Internet.

HTML Tidy, the W3C's tool for cleaning up HTML source code.

GNATS, the GNU project's bug tracking system

Linux kernel's implementation of IPv6 networking protocol.