And that finally brings me to the point that prompted this whole ramble. A recent Wired profile of Monty Taylor, one of the OpenStack developers, made the point that the developers on key open source projects often have multiple companies interested in employing them, and that this is a well-recognised fact.
What this does is help to finally create a true engineering centre of power, distinct from the traditional corporate power centres of finance and people management. When upstream is heavily volunteer driven, with all activity conducted in public, you simply can't get away with the traditional proprietary BS where the features that are implemented get dictated in an autocratic fashion from on high.