I don't think it's that it got lost, but rather that a lot more money got into open source development. While I was at school I was really interested in hacking on Mozilla, where they were espousing ideals about meritocracy. After a while I realized that it really mean the folks they employed to work on Firefox had all the power, simply because they had more hours per day changing everything so casual contributors couldn't keep up.

It made sense for them, of course, since they can't hire that many people and just have them sit on their thumbs all day.