I'd love to see a history of FOSS in its "golden era" (early aughts) to the early teens. There was this great momentum at the time, giant advances in the Linux desktop and server, and a large focus worldwide on open standards (XMPP became, briefly, the standard chat protocol).
This progress stalled. My theory is that it's in large part due to OSX convincing FOSS developers "it's UNIX" and with FOSS devs on Macs, Linux desktop advances slowed down.
@kyle I wonder if some of the stall wasn't also from the constant forking and fracturing of core areas different FOSS contributors couldn't agree on. That may also tie into your theory though as OSX said "you want to make sounds? do it this way", but early aughts Linux said "you want to make sounds? there are 6.02E23 ways to do that. 0 of them work together".
