EU software patent law faces axe 800

Well, Rick, you say that over and again and it means nothing at all. You are, at the end of the day, just another mooching freeware user with nothing to contribute and cannot speak the mind of the developer either. Being such a user, your view is certainly prejudiced by your desires for the situation to continue. We can only speculate as to what is the mind set of the open software developers. Certainly not all software developers are willing to contribute anything to open software. A quick inspection of our own shop shows that only a handful out of a hundred are even mildly interested in this kind of activity and most of these rarely if ever do so.

Surely the spectrum of developers is not so bipolar that the Free software contributors are all separated from the non-contributors by a vast no-man's land of atbreastude. I expect that there are open source developers who would stop contributing in an instant at one end of a continuum and some that would never stop at the other. If it so happens that some key individual that you might depend on for some code that you find particularly necessary were to be in the former category, you might be in trouble in the long term.

Is that all? Do they like developing or do they like doing it for free?

Can you rely on that? They may be fibbing just to avoid controversy or because they sense that it is the right thing to say, but might disappear overnight if they are offered a job in a commercial company that might restrict their ability to work on OSS stuff.

I realize that you want to believe that since it is a convenient answer. But it goes against the grain easily observable in the overall population of developers.