Researching upon Open Source, i found something that seems important to understanding it but is left in the locker room by the linux zealots:
Linux
Innovation? New? No, it's just another copy of the same old stuff.
OLD stuff.
Compare program development on Linux with Microsoft Visual Studio or one of the IBM Java/web toolkits. Linux's success may indeed be the single strongest argument for my thesis: The excitement generated by a clone of a decadesold operating system demonstrates the void that the systems software research community has failed to fill.
Besides, Linux's cleverness is not in the software, but in the development model, hardly a triumph of academic CS (especially software engineering) by any measure.
from System Research is Irrelevant by Rob Pike