Earlier quoted context omitted.
GCC which has probably 10x more people working on it than any commercial compiler Citation? Personally I think you pulled that figure out of your ass; especially since the GCC codebase is a mess (on purpose), it's been stable and good enough (and arguably stagnant) for quite a while and all attention shifts lately to LLVM. With relatively small developer teams, they've increased in quality as fast as any open source…
I just looked at the GCC contributors list and used an educated estimateof how many on various commercial compilers. I don't have exact numbers, which is why I said "probably". And we aren't talking only about high-level ideas here, but actual implementation details. Huh? What implementation details? Citation? Silverlight looks fundamentally different than any other product, except WPF. I'd love to see who their copy…
Back when my company started using Silverlight, I was surprised to learn that none of my coworkers knew it was almost the same as Adobe Flex. I think this sort of ignorance about the greater world of programming is exactly what the original post is talking about.