[EvanAnderson]

I think Free software encourages exceptional end users to participate as you're describing. I didn't mean to imply differently. Encouraging this kind of development is definitely good.

The bigger win that I see, though, is enabling communities of users to band together and work together or finance development of software with the community's common goals in mind. That's not something that proprietary software has historically done much of, and proprietary software doesn't permit that community to fork the software when goals don't align.