The lack of money in the system is driving major corporations to use OSS in order to cut costs. As this trend continues and the tech economy continues to shift more and more towards OSS, many programmers will find that OSS programming becomes their full time job. When OSS is your full time job, maintaining your project becomes mission critical. We can only expect better OSS from the current economic trends.

Simply look at the article about the effect of focusing so much energy on the low achieving students in our education system. The best and the brightest get left behind. http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/19/0333202 Of course this is not the only reason for Darpa's brain drain. I'd suggest increasing salaries, benefits, etc. Private companies are probably doing cooler stuff and paying more.