The big closed-source companies aren't coming up with new technologies--oftentimes they're playing damage control by implementing ideas--some already commonplace in open-source programs.
Example: Microsoft is adding tabbed browsing in IE7, something that has existed in Firefox and other browsers for at least a year and a half.
Go into your C:\Windows\system32 and open ftp.exe in Notepad. Scroll down a ways and tell me what you see.
Examples: having a TCP/IP stack (BSD), kerberos authentication (MIT), SMTP mail server (delivermail/Sendmail) and DNS server (BIND).
Kerberos is a funny one for GE. It couldn't be exported because of the encryption it included, so the code minus the encryption (thus legal) was shipped outside the US, where an Australian cryptographer put the encryption back in. Yeah, crypto export really did a lot of good.
FTP? LMAOOOO