Without disagreeing with you about their overall similarity, your claim that "descendants of Perl and javascript ... include Python, Ruby, and PHP" is obviously

Without disagreeing with you about their overall similarity, your claim that "descendants of Perl and javascript ... include Python, Ruby, and PHP" is obviously mistaken. Maybe you meant "descendents of Perl and Python include JavaScript, Ruby, and PHP". Just a question of historical accuracy. Either way, this nit-picking doesn't affect your main claim that most revolutionary technologies came from closed companies, and that languages seem to be the main exception. In response to that main point, it seems to me that in a lot of cases, the amazing closed-source technologies are actually rooted in technologies developed in the open, before FLOSS had a name (indeed, before AT&T's crackdown pushed RMS to coin Free Software). Consider the success of Unix: initial development by a closed not-for-profit lab, and elaborated by an informal open process. Consider the open and collaborative processes that gave us all sorts of networking technologies, including TCP/IP, including hypertext, etc. And Javascript would have died in a ghetto if it had been limited to one company's browser.