Quote: I had a few bugs fixed in NetBeans, and other open source software, that I provided myself. They were accepted without many problems. It doesn't go always in this way, but it's way better than with closed software, where you can't ever think of making a contribution...
And who paid you for that ? Nobody. It devalues you as a developer. You are acting in a business environment just to mention the obvious. It's even worse when thinking of various GPL products such as JBoss. In this case you don't only devalue yourself but you also increase the value of a different company (RedHat in this case).
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@Klaus I'm not an Eclipse fan, because I use NetBeans. In any case, it's open source too. It happens that 80/90% of Java developers use an open source IDE, so they don't find it so bad.
Sorry but that's a weird argument. If I asked by boss whether I could buy IntelliJ for 500$, he will just laugh at me. At some stage such IDEs cost 2000-5000$ and this money fed numerous (paid) developers caring about these products full time. Then came Eclipse/Netbeans and this market collapsed. Same goes for most of the middleware market. Completely insane.
Anyway, I think we drifted quite a bit off-topic ;-)