@Edward Rose
I'm confused, it's true.
There are two conflicting statements in your post that I'm trying to reconcile:
1) O-S doesn't mean you must give your labour or ideas away for free. Not even vaguely.
2) So, free of charge I try to make them happy.
These two statements seem to be contradictory. Free-of-charge and give-away seem to be the same to me.
There exists a value to your labor. You control the marketplace for your labor, so you may do with it what you want.
I still have a family, a mortgage, and obligations that demand I pay others what I owe. You may give your labor away, if that is what you desire. I do not. I cannot.
Open Source IS about working for free -- especially with the idea that your labor is not worthless. Charity would mean nothing if you offered worthless handouts or worthless code.
Read again, I stated clearly and up-front that open source is quite valuable in small-group settings or club-like atmospheres, but that it can only inhibit the marketplace at a certain level.
I do get it. Surprisingly enough, I work in many environments and some of them actually use code from Open Source contributors. Bless 'em, Open Source folks are mostly pretty good at what they do.
But where a business must rely on its own proprietary business rules and keep it's code close to the chest -- especially when the code is the business -- Open Source advocacy is equivalent to asking the business to commit businesscide.
Please continue to give away your code. I'm sure there's a place in heaven where the open source geeks will get special distros and RCs that the rest of us don't get. But don't devalue my work because you give yours away.
Paris, because she's given it away so much, she's going to need charity soon.