[TallGuyShort]

What open source projects do you know where there's a significant portion of the work being done for free and a corporation reaping significant rewards? I mean if you look at the Linux and Hadoop ecosystems, the most successful companies dump significant money into contributing to all sorts of projects. And most of the significant contributors I know are professional. You do see more involved bug reports from users and more student projects, but it's a minority of the work, and I'd argue they're reaping some good benefits from the community themselves. Mozilla is a community I've known several work-for-free contributors in, but Mozilla's not exactly raking in cash and flying their executives to exotic destinations in private jets all the time as far as I know.

My point above is precisely that I see open-source pitched to companies as "look you can get the community working for you" but I think that's (a) missing the point of free software, and (b) probably not happening much. Dumping stuff on Github might get some pull requests generated, but you don't get a functioning community without investing heavily in it yourself. Companies that don't really invest in open source generally have ghost-town communities and aren't well equipped to harness the power of those pull requests to begin with - it goes both ways.