What does that even mean? How could GNOME do what Apple does if all the code is open source? Anyone can come, change whatever they want and ship it as their own. This is what Ubuntu and others have been doing for years. The kind of competition you consider "ideal" is already happening, and has happened for years. The only problem is that some people seem to expect that because you hack on free software you should not be allowed to have strong opinions about the UX of the code you are doing, and must submit to the will of all users and drive-by designers on blogs (which routinely ask for an innumerable set of mutually contradicting features, threatening to leave the project if they are not listened to).