A lot of open source comes from companies who make their money not by selling technology but by selling services, often by leveraging data, which they guard jea

A lot of open source comes from companies who make their money not by selling technology but by selling services, often by leveraging data, which they guard jealously. They have little to lose and a lot of geek cred to gain by open sourcing useful projects, not to mention the bonus of "commoditizing your complements" a la Spolsky. This does not apply to companies that sell the technology itself. Not to mention the fact that telecomm R&D is not like software R&D, which, let's face it, is mostly just re-doing D for R that happened decades ago.