Your thesis is wrong and your examples are bad. HTML isn't software. (Maybe you meant NCSA Mosaic, a proprietary program that was free for non-commercial use.)

Your thesis is wrong and your examples are bad. HTML isn't software. (Maybe you meant NCSA Mosaic, a proprietary program that was free for non-commercial use.) Apache came after several other web servers, e.g. Netscape's commercial one. Whether Perl is innovative is at least a subject for debate. For fairness compare best-of-breed open source projects to best-of breed commercial ones. Which is more innovative, Linux or NeXTSTEP? Perl or Smalltalk? The gap is huge.