Our sister site Linux Format has published their pick of four top open source innovations, proving that it's not always the commercial sector that comes up with the goods.
Linux Format rubbishes claims such as "Without commercial software spending so much money on research, open source software would have no new ideas" and "Open source needs commercial software to survive," by showing four ideas that have come from the open source community that even users of Windows and Macs will have heard of.
3D desktops top the list for beautifying desktops, while Live CDs get a mention for making it easy to try a new OS. Collaborative wiki editing - without that we'd have no Wikipedia - and Virtual Network Computing complete the four.