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Comment by kmavm | Hacker News Reader

"Most innovations within the last 20 years came from OSS developers creating incredible techniques used by Apple/MS/etc..."

Name one.

To take some examples I happen to have first-hand intimacy with: Linux is both original and good, but the original parts are frequently not good, and the good parts are clones of Solaris. Touchscreen happened in iOS first. Modern virtualization happened in VMware's closed-source base first. Modern information retrieval is still a proprietary Google secret.

The most important counter-examples I can think of are languages. The "everything is a hash table" descendants of Perl and javascript (in which I include Python, Ruby, and PHP) would not have been viable as commercial products. That said, even javascript began life as a Netscape proprietary implementation, and Perl is mostly a synthesis of ideas present in ksh.

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Touchscreen happened in iOS first.

What? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_Zaurus is just one counterexample of many.

"Touchscreen that civilians care about."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_scotsman

That is not a touchscreen. That is a stylus driven OS. Much like the Newton, which preceded it.

Finger-responsive touchscreens were around long before Apple used them - they were just generally larger than the iphone. Surely you must have seen them somewhere, from museum displays to fast-food cash registers.

The iPhone is not a "finger responsive touch screen". These screens are really easy to make-- they have a grid of sense lines and can tell if there's a finger at the intersection of two of them. They are completely confused if two fingers touch the screen at the same time.

What the iPhone does is map the entire shape of a finger, as well as many other fingers, touching the screen to determine how many fingers, what orientation, etc.

This is completely different. That you and others claim they are the same shows the frank dishonesty at the core of the anti-innovation crowd here on hacker news. I'm at a loss for the motivation of anti-innovation people to hang out on an ostensibly startup oriented site, but you have succeeded in ruining it.

* rpm, dpkg, apt-get finally killed dll hell

* Various UI improvements: customizable panel widgets, multi-desktop pagers, ..

* git and other dvcs's

* qemu (virtualization through dynamic recompilation)

* gcc extensions

* gdb: reversible debugging

More?

Python is in no sense an everything-is-a-hashtable language.

"The default behavior for attribute access is to get, set, or delete the attribute from an object’s dictionary. For instance, a.x has a lookup chain starting with a.__dict__['x'], then type(a).__dict__['x'], and continuing through the base classes of type(a) excluding metaclasses."

http://docs.python.org/reference/datamodel.html#invoking-des...

VMware was probably based on M Rosenblum's graduate work on SimOS, which was GPL.

If it's fair to call Perl "mostly a synthesis ideas present in ksh," I think it would also be fair to call Mac OSX "BSD plus a display server driven by postscript and a UI written in Objective C."

> VMware was probably based on M Rosenblum's graduate work on SimOS, which was GPL.

I worked on VMware's virtual machine monitor from 2000 to 2009. Mendel's students' work on SimOS had nothing at all to do with VMware, full-stop; SimOS was just a full-system simulator, useful for measurement and educational purposes, which has almost nothing to do with virtualization.

The research system of Mendel's that did influence VMware's founding was Disco[0], a virtual machine monitor for SGI's MIPS machines. But the technique Disco used (trap-and-emulate) was inapplicable on x86, and in fact there was peer-reviewed literature claiming the x86 was impossible to virtualize[1]. VMware's first six years of products were instead based on dynamic binary translation; we incrementally recompiled the privileged x86 guest into unprivileged x86 code, in much the same way modern JVMs incrementally compile Java bytecodes into native machine instructions. Our source base was 100% VMware proprietary, and had to be since no open source project was trying anything remotely related at the time.

[0] http://www-flash.stanford.edu/~bugnion/Disco/sosp-html/ [1] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1251316&dl=ACM&col....

About as fair as calling an Indy Car a Buckboard with an engine instead of a horse. Perl and OS X are quite a bit more.

Touchscreen was invented in a government funded university research lab, not iOS.

Do not lump PHP with Python and Ruby. It is incredibly rude and betrays a lack of understanding about the pedigree of these languages.

Python predates JavaScript by nearly half a decade.

Perl's big inspirations were sed, grep, and awk, not ksh, according to Larry Wall. However, there is no reason that Larry might not have known about ksh, and it's entirely possible that he was thinking of ksh when he implemented Perl.

I work on a PHP compiler and runtime for a living, so I'm reasonably familiar with its past, present and future. While Ruby and Python are superior in many ways, these three languages (and Perl and JS) have much more in common than they do separating them: Algol syntax, runtime typing, hash-table like duck-typed objects, automatic memory management, some half-baked (for all but JS) concessions to functional style, etc. If you consider them in a world that includes C++, Haskell, Prolog, x64 assembly, Smalltalk, and Lisp, all of these languages form an incredibly tight cluster in the configuration space.

And granting for the sake of argument that Larry Wall wasn't thinking of ksh, sed, grep and awk were just as AT&T proprietary as ksh was.

Ruby and Python have strong types, no automatic coercion besides numeric promotion, customizable and extensible type models, the ability to create new first-class types, a complete type system, dynamic attribute and method dispatch; these things are not in the flavors of ECMAScript used in browsers and Node, to the point where there is no "class" keyword, or an equivalent, in JS.

I object to Ruby and Python being lumped with JS mostly on account of features, and additionally because JS does not occupy the same systems-programming niche that Ruby and Python can easily fill. (And some companies, like Google, would not permit Ruby and Python to be grouped, nor Python with C++ and Java.)

Edit: Nevermind, you're right. I concede.

> cluster in the configuration space

10 bits of evidence that you read LessWrong. (Sorry, couldn't help it.)

Without disagreeing with you about their overall similarity, your claim that "descendants of Perl and javascript ... include Python, Ruby, and PHP" is obviously mistaken. Maybe you meant "descendents of Perl and Python include JavaScript, Ruby, and PHP". Just a question of historical accuracy.

Either way, this nit-picking doesn't affect your main claim that most revolutionary technologies came from closed companies, and that languages seem to be the main exception.

In response to that main point, it seems to me that in a lot of cases, the amazing closed-source technologies are actually rooted in technologies developed in the open, before FLOSS had a name (indeed, before AT&T's crackdown pushed RMS to coin Free Software). Consider the success of Unix: initial development by a closed not-for-profit lab, and elaborated by an informal open process. Consider the open and collaborative processes that gave us all sorts of networking technologies, including TCP/IP, including hypertext, etc. And Javascript would have died in a ghetto if it had been limited to one company's browser.

AT&T may have invented these, but the versions everyone uses are the GNU ones.

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