From an article by Jaron Lanier:

[A] politically correct dogma holds that open source is automatically the best path to creativity and innovation, and that claim is not borne out by the facts…[a]n honest empiricist must conclude that while the open approach has been able to create lovely, polished copies, it hasn’t been so good at creating notable originals. Even though the open-source movement has a stinging countercultural rhetoric, it has in practice been a conservative force.

Pretty strong stuff, and I’m assuming that there are a lot of people out there right now vehemently disagreeing with this. Lanier singles out PageRank, Flash, and the iPhone as prime recent examples of “closed-source” creativity. Just having spent a day with the iPhone, I can tell you that it’s the most innovative thing I’ve ever seen, but is the argument sturdy enough to drive the nail through the palm of the open-source movement?

(h/t Slashdot)