Open Source copies while Proprietary systems innovate

[yesthattom]

The proprietary world often criticises the OSS movement for making great clones but not innovating. I agree with this criticism... sometimes... but also point out that Microsoft has extended the definition of "innovation" to include "creative ways to combine old apps" and includes making an old technology pervasive to be "an innovation". This becomes an escalating war of words, each redefining innovation. The OSS movement claims that free versions that clone proprietary software is an innovation.

I made a comment on someone's post about people putting crappy data into CDDB and later realized that this is an opportunity for FreeDB to do a lot better.

The FreeDB people cloned the CDDB concept so they could install their better politics into the system. That's a nice start. If they really want to win the hearts and minds of the world, they have to provide a better service. That means provide a different database schema. They need to fix the problems with "Various Artist" albums, with "remix" entries, and "mix CDs". They need to provide a web-based user interface for adding new entries, for suggesting improvements, and making corrections. (When there are 2 entries for the same disc I want people to be able to "vote" on which one they like better so that badly formatted ones slowly disappear). They can provide the old CDDB API so that old software doesn't break.

If they did that, people would use them over CDDB. However, as long as they are simply cloning a bad system, they get no fanmail from me.

And that goes to the people cloning MS-Office, Windows, UNIX, and everything else in that category.

Comments

[airshipjones.livejournal.com]

I have believed this for quite some time as well. I think that MS rules, not because they are better, but because they are more convenient. They have made themselves easy to use, easy to get, and easy to understand. Most people I talk to don't want to have to think about the OS, or the software, they want to think about what the software and OS lets them do, and even thought MS doesn't do the best job, overall they do an adequate job while being the most convenient. That is what most people want, and until the open source movement can delivery that, MS will predominate.

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

The point I was making was about systems like FreeDB, which doesn't have that issue.

While what you said is true, it wasn't the point I was trying to make.

what we really need

[mrfantasy.livejournal.com]

Is something like IMDB but for music. Provide a backend CDDB API if you wish. We were just talking about this at work today. For some reason this hasn't happened yet. I'd love to see a guest player on a CD and find out with a few clicks what albums they've performed on and what artists they've worked with. If you're getting really anal, you could use this to have data about concerts and concert tours. I would use something like this all the time.