well just curious .. what do you guys think has been the most innovative project to hit the open souce world?

my vote is for bittorrent...

well, most opensource seems to have a lot of little innovations besides big ones, I don't know much about early unix gui's but i think I'll say X

look at twm, that early GUI

the early DE was (i cant remember its name , started with C i think, bit motif was the toolkit) ... ugly as hell, but functional


my vote goes to bonnobo (used in gnome, acts kinda like a plugin system, allowing programs to add functionality, only by using a bonnobo, very good i think), but there are many others, 3d-desktop (a virtual desktop changer), 3d file browsers, then all the functionality ..... soo much to pick from, almost all of it more innovative then anything m$ has.

some of my favorites are

-bonnobo
-glade - make GUI from xml files, i think at runtime
-reiserfs4 - a file system, with plugins to add things like encryption ... beat winfs - if it gets here ....
-3d things (what i said above)

then you have the old innovations like gcc, and gettext (as well as X, and UNIX)

but, i think theres a big lack of innovation in the file managers, one of the rare (and annoying) areas where things dont change much.

Apache gets my vote.

I vote for UNIX: (after all it is open source)
Also KDE's knotes, RSS feeds, Mozilla Firefox, Minix and RPM packages.

@SciYro:
You were thinking of CDE. (common desktop environment)

yeah, i think RSS was very innovative; and firefox's live bookmarks also...

i think back in the day Debian's APT might have been uber-innovative too, but i'm not too familiar with the history behind it...

I would have to say the most innovative software overall would have to be the c programming language..