Most of that is bullshit. The biggest reason for contributing to open source is to level the playing field on things that aren't your core competency.
For example Red Hat's core competency is support, consulting and business solutions. To deliver this they need a solid operating system and server stack. They don't have the resources to do this on their own, so they use open source products, and contribute back their improvements, as do others with similar business models. That way they're free to compete with each other on consulting, and the existence of the software is just a given.
IBM makes a lot of money on high-end hardware, but they need a software stack to run on it, and this is often more effort than it's worth to build in-house. So they sell hardware with open source software, and just contribute what's necessary to meet the needs of their hardware customers. Once again, being able to take the operating system and server stack as a given allows them to compete in the hardware space where they feel they have their core competency.
Trading houses also contribute to open source projects to level the playing field on things that should just be a given. For example there's no point developing your own strategy prototyping framework, machine learning system, unit test framework, implementation of standard protocols, etc. So you create or use open source libraries, and contribute fixes and improvements. That way you spread out work on boring stuff that everyone knows how to do and concentrate more time on trading strategies that actually make you money.
The most vocal people talk about the community, altruism and ideals, but in reality most open source exists because it makes business sense.
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Re: Why Do Developers Contribute to Open Source Projects?
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