[dingallero]

In my limited experience, I'm not sure it's an advantage.

You do get to break the ice faster during interviews and contacting new clients. But it can easily backfire as well: people will ask why "project X" is not up to their coding standards, why you didn't contribute to "X" and/or why "X" has not been fixed yet.

Not everybody seem to grasp this notion that these might not be professional products.

I often discuss with my friends that do not have any public projects to show off during interviews. It really doesn't seem to affect the outcome, unless the company in itself is interested in one of your projects (which is pretty rare considering the breadth of OSS).