Work that extends the noosphere is better than work that duplicates an existing piece of functional territory. But it's not actually quite that simple. Duplicating the functions of existing closed software counts as highly as original work if by doing so you break open a closed protocol or format and make that territory newly available. Nevertheless, the members of the Samba group are perceived as heroes because they neutralize a Microsoft effort to lock in whole user populations and cordon off a big section of the noosphere. Work that makes it into a major distribution is better than work that doesn't.
Work carried in all major distributions is most prestigious.
The major distributions include not just the big Linux distributions like Red Hat, Debian, Caldera, and S.u. Trusting the judgment of others is basic to the peer-review process. It's necessary because nobody has time to review all possible alternatives. So work used by lots of people is considered better than work used by a few, To have done work so good that nobody cares to use the alternatives any more is therefore to have earned huge prestige. The most possible peer esteem comes from having done widely popular, category-killing original work that is carried by all major distributions.