Talli,
I posted this on .LRN forum, but it might help to this discussion. Have a look at:
http://news.com.com/2009-1087_3-1024609.html
"Programmers contribute to free software and open-source projects for many reasons--some for the fun of it, some to improve their skills and others for a paycheck.
Many people have wondered why these people give their work away. The truth is that many projects have become incorporated in order to protect themselves from individual liability. Since the founding of the Free Software Foundation in 1985, a number of new nonprofit foundations have formed, often around specific technologies, to serve the interests of programmers.
Harvard Business School professor Siobhan O'Mahony discusses her research on foundations formed around three projects: Debian, a complete non-commercial distribution of Linux; the GNU Object Model Environment (GNOME), which is a graphical user interface for Linux-based operating systems; and Apache, a public domain open source Web server."
