A FEW POINTERS ;) (Score 1)

Name one totally new creation that OSS has brought us.

Name one totally new creation, period. Depends on what you mean. It's easy to argue that nothing is really new.

But with a less demanding definition of free, Usenet comes to mind. So do any number of other networking applications. Many things originally developed at universities were open source before open source was cool. Real-time Internet chat, the web, the concept of software archives, a good chunk of e-mail... those are all arguably open source projects.

You have a good point, and maybe a subtler one than you intended to make, though. Everyone says that Microsoft doesn't do anything new, that OSS doesn't do anything new... that Apple didn't do anything new, just took interface ideas from Xerox, etc. The underlying principle here is that the nature of software is that most of what you're doing isn't new. Reusable code and all that.

What would you prefer, an application that's stable, works day in and out, and lets you accomplish what you're spending your time doing today, or a program that has a lot of cool features that you may (or may not) need tomorrow, but crashes all the time? I know which one I'd take.

And that's what OSS needs to be good at, to produce the software that people will want to use rather than write press releases about. The innovation and features will come without being obsessed about. Those of you who are programmers know what I mean. It's almost impossible to keep yourself from coming up with new ideas. Getting them tested, working for everyone else, documented, and stable is the hard part. And while Microsoft isn't very good at it, we're rather spotty at it ourselves. No one in the software industry is very good at it yet.

OSS isn't some magic formula to make us better at this than Microsoft is. Writing stable software is work. It takes time, energy, and a willingness to forgoe features to get the software more stable. And we're just as susceptible to not doing that as Microsoft is, if not moreso because most OSS projects don't have a team of professional docwriters in the wings whose job it is to document things.