[jkeiser]

It's kind of a "continued learning" requirement, a little. Work doesn't always have the problems (or funding for them) that grow you in the right directions.

Open source is also a sort of portfolio for many people, I think. Resumes can only tell you so much; code speaks volumes. It pays, just not directly or immediately.

Though my first job in Silicon Valley-sized tech was at Netscape, and I got that specifically after writing some big open source patches for Mozilla. So it can sometimes pay more directly.