I find your assertion that basement hackers never "invent" silly. Heck, Google/Pagerank started in a garage, as the saying goes. The demo you link is amazing and I'm not sure anyone has topped that in or out of a company since, but using that as proof that only companies and governments can invent is fallacious.

Many other statements you make are downright false or silly. For example, you say "the GUIs are copies of Windows or Mac" and yet I've never seen a powerful tiling window manager on those two OSs ... certainly not before I used them on Linux. There might be similarity between some WMs and others, but there are dozens that are fairly novel.

The "Basement / Garage hacker that changes the world" you say is a myth; and yet Google and Apple both have undeniably changed the world despite originating with basement hackers.

Furthermore, the industry has moved to open source where it's easier for a basement hacker to do something big. At the time that video was made, you would have to create practically everything from the ground up. There was no free code to build on. Anyone might have had an idea expressed in that video, but he or she would have had great difficulty implementing it in a basement due to lack of resources to make the whole stack.

Nowadays, if I have an idea, there's a good chance many components of it are already done in the open source sphere, and I can "stand on the shoulders of giants" and implement my idea with minimal work. The ability to create slow and steady progress and have such diverse bases on which to build, I think, makes the basement hacker far more possible. The jump from idea to working product is now much shorter in the software world than ever before.

Next, you say "basement hackers can innovate ... but it certainly doesn't invent". I honestly don't see the difference you're drawing between innovation and invention. innovate is the verb that creates inventions, the noun. I'm just not seeing what you're trying to do by creating that false dichotomy.

I also think you have the intent of "IP" a bit wrong. Patents are supposed to grant limited monopolies to people who have innovated. IP also covers trademarks and copyright which each have nothing to do with "innovative work" paying. By using IP there, you just fell into the trap of the article you're commenting on (I recommend reading it).

Furthermore, you say patents are meant to reward innovative work. That's simply false. Innovative work rewards itself. If you invent something truly innovative, you'll make money selling it. If patents were only meant to reward, they would have no requirement of disclosing sufficient details to reproduce the invention. What patents are meant to do is help the economy and industry as much as possible. A patent requires an inventor to disclose his invention and gives him a limited monopoly. The disclosure is meant to allow others to use his idea to create further inventions. The monopoly is to encourage people to disclose ideas at all, not merely hoard them as trade secrets.

"Invention is also hard for startups because there is little to no way to monetize it." ... The whole point of a useful invention is that it solves a problem in a novel way. Surely people with that problem will want to pay for the solution that didn't exist before?