If we are to use the physical world as a rough analogue of what we've been building in our virtual/information universe... opensource has been very prevalent in creating the buildings, roads, interchanges, flyover, bridges and such... which are the infrastructure to house, transport and manage the contents (os, network stack, db, messaging services, etc) but not of the content themselves.

I think this is quite evident too when comparing the app selections between the handheld platforms...