I'd argue that post-PRISM, there's a big opportunity to re-create self-hosted options for services known to be open books to the government. It might not be creative, but it does provides users a familiar alternative to storing their data in the cloud.

Yeah, RMS shouldn't have bothered making a free version of UNIX. Linus shouldn't have have made a free, sub-standard version of MINIX.

The Dovecot devs shouldn't have made Dovecot when we already had UW IMAP. Postfix is redundant, we've had Sendmail for decades.

They all should really have done something original instead.