Innovation doesn't just happen in headlines

Boy, did MySQL's David Axmark just put his finger on why the general press doesn't often grasp what's going on with open source. Speaking at this morning's opening keynote at the MySQL conference, Axmark said:

"Open source has always been innovative in the small things. Proprietary vendors tend to go for the headlines, the big things you can write in the white papers. Things that never make a headline, fix 10,000 of them, and it makes a huge difference."

Is it possible to incorporate 10,000 fixes over several years into a newspaper or Web page headline? Do any tech press editors even try?

Hey, I'd settle for reading more stories about thousands of bugs, persisting in someone's existing code, that don't get fixed over several years of opportunity and customer feedback. I suspect that's a huge reason certain proprietary software companies don't want to publish their source code -- fear of sheer embarrassment.