There are lots of *practical* reasons why proprietary and commercial environments aren't really capable of producing innovation, but those are not the ones I want to focus on here.

The bigger reason why proprietary systems cannot be innovative is more philosophical. "Innovation", to me, is a very specific thing: it is the collective process of discovering and iterating on new techniques and technologies, to make society a little better for everyone every time.

The "iterating on" is important there; innovation is about *collective knowledge building*, about improving humanity's collective understanding of the world in a durable and sustainable way, and ensuring that those who come after us can build on our work to improve a little further.

Proprietary systems, by their very nature, cannot do this. "Innovations" in proprietary systems will live and die with the organizations in which they are built; the knowledge of their workings is secret and deliberately obscured, practically guaranteeing a loss of knowledge when the organization eventually folds - as every organization does sooner or later.

Proprietary organizations simply do not participate in the process of innovation at all; they *emulate* it, as a cheap party trick to impress investors and accumulate more power, economic or otherwise.

For something to be truly innovative, it *must* happen in the open, no exceptions. If others outside of your control cannot iterate on it, it is not truly innovation, no matter how clever it sounds.