Reply #11: Nice sentiment, but...

[JBoris]

Most "open source" projects are actually developed by paid employees of companies or non-profit organizations. Unix was originally developed by AT&T employees at Bell labs, OpenOffice was mostly developed by software megacorp Sun Microsytems, and Apache is developed by paid employees of a non-profit.

I'm not saying that there aren't private citizens who write software for free (just for the nerd-cred). Ubuntu is based on a Linux Kernel that was originally developed by a student, but Ubuntu itself is developed by paid employees of a company as well as paid employees of a non-profit.

Furthermore I don't see how developing free software, that enable companies to make a profit, will help "IT types" if they give away their hard earned skills for free.