When critics lambaste FOSS for not being innovative, they mean “copying our ideas that we copied from someone else, but we pretend ours are original.” It’s a silly criticism because genuinely original inventions are few and far between. Even sillier is not acknowledging how many commercial products are built on FOSS. Everyone builds on work done by others; nothing emerges from a vacuum. Linux and FOSS can claim many genuine innovations.
Like the open, distributed, de-centralized development model, which the Linux kernel team have elevated to an art form, incorporating contributions from thousands of contributors, absorbing thousands of changes every day (yes, every day!), and somehow the beast works, and works well. Distributed open development depends on a free Internet, which runs on FOSS.