Honestly, I thing that ESR's take on the motivations for participating in Free software development are misguided and apply only to a minority of the contributors. I make changes to Free Software projects when they fail to meet my needs in some specific way that I can remedy. I offer my changes back to the community so that others might benefit from them. Looking at many of the core developers for the same projects, they started the same way. No ego boosts, no "noosphere", just a task that needed doing and a willingness to share the results with others. Maybe it's me that's the odd one here, but I see it as a perfectly rational transaction, programming time in exchange for working code. Neither capitalist nor communist, but something more closely resembling a mass-barter system where most of the participants are making a living by using the software that they work on rather than by buying or selling the software itself. Obviously there are other layers to the Free Software ecosystem, but without that root the rest doesn't really work out so well. -- Dan