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I agree. Most innovation does take place in academic environments. And while it academic projects are often open source, they are not necessarily GPL. Some are of course, but historically most have not been. These days it also seems like many projects are 'free for academic use only'.

I don't want to be overly harsh on open source. I do in fact like such software and use it daily. Windows XP may not in of itself have many huge innovations, but then it really is a maintenance release anyways. Microsoft does innovate though. Obvious examples are .NET and C#. The upcoming WinFS sounds like a good idea as well. Apple innovated with Quartz extreme. The idea of a windowing environment and the mouse were both born from a company, Xerox. Granted those ideas were given away free it seems. Apple did evolve the windowing environment and many UI concepts can likely be attributed to them. Also consider that many academic concepts and prototypes are not particularly usable. Whether you can call it an innovation or not may be questionable, proprietary companies do a great job of bringing these technologies into usable and (mostly) well designed systems.

I guess I should also point out that I am not considering academic works to be part of the GPL software community since these don't follow the general model being described. They have one or two paid specialists working on a topic, not an army of volunteers. Academic positions are also difficult to get and limited in nubmers. In other words a special case.