So there's
Nxt, MasterCoin, BitShares (or is it ProtoShares?), eMunie, Open Transactions, all of which are supposedly going to be launched/released soon (any others?). It is very easy to market vaporware - just claim that your product has feature X, and it does. Since its just vaporware it can have all the best features before it even exists.
Ripple, on the other hand, actually exists and already has one major gateway (kraken next in line) and two chinese gateways (with rising CNY capitalization btw, up from 250k CNY in october to 539k CNY on Nov 12th to 787k CNY today).
The competition hasn't even left the starting line.
If you think of Open-Transactions as a competitor to Ripple, then you are misinformed. That's like calling openssl a competitor to Excel.
Also, OT has been publicly available for a long time:
https://github.com/FellowTraveler/Open-TransactionsOkay then, I should have said Invictus Innovations, Monetas, and Ripple Labs.
I know OT has been available, and you're right that its not a fair comparison to Ripple. Because OT is an API around Chaumian cash/Lucre coins. The p2p exchange is a "feature" which exists only on the roadmap, and in various proposals for a "holy grail" bitmessage-based exchange and multi-sig voting pools.
Then there's Ripple, which already has a distributed ledger and is constantly matching bid/ask offers every few seconds. Pretty good volume today, users were trading $1k chunks of bitstamp USD for XRP. And deposits at the chinese gateways broke the CNY 1,000,000 mark.