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No, I'll stick by my assertion. Open source is great for things that are well understood. Apache, for example, is a great web server, but everyone understands what a web server is supposed to do. Open source is not very good at real innovation, because the consensus model it uses, plus the lack of big time monetary resources, mitigates against it.

If you accept the notion that open source is more innovative than commercial products, then where are the radically new software applications to displace the old guard? Where are the "next big things"? All that I see from the open source community are outright rip-offs of existing commercial offerings that don't push the envelope at all. Tabbed browsing? Pop-up Blocking? New OS shells? Themes? This is somebody's idea of "innovation"?!? Puh-lease. I want to see an example of tomorrow's "spreadsheet" or "web-browser" eminating from the open source community -- not a cheap iterative knock-off of well-understood concepts. True innovation has little to do with the development model (open versus closed source) for a project -- and more to do with (a) the brains producing it, (b) the amount of investment capital (intellectual and financial) poured into it, and (c) an interest in serving customer needs. I just don't see the same kind of investment in research among the open source community that you see in private industry. Which explains why the OSS crowd is so interested in cloning anything that's popularized by for-profit companies.