Is Open Source Innovating?

A Google engineer named Douwe Osinga recently posted on his blog an argument that Open Source software is not innovative. He compares open source to the Soviet Communist propagandists who railed at the US for allowing poverty while people stood in bread lines in Moscow.

This argument however is completely fallacious, most of the important innovations occuring today in non-'webservice' application development are coming out of open source. (Rails, Bittorrent, Wiki Engines, Ajax Frameworks, etc)

Software patent blackmail is not just terribly harmful to open source software development, it hurts all software development.

Copying other people is core to any invention, we all stand on the shoulders of giants.

I could write a whole essay on why Open Source IS innovative, right down to the development model itself, but I don't want to give more attention to this argument than it's worth.