The Maximal Usage Doctrine of OSS (or: Why Having Users is a Good Thing)

This is absolutely true when your users are naturally programmers: libraries and frameworks benefit more from network effects than any other not-inherently-viral software I know of. The users can, do, must contribute! Everybody gets their warm fuzzies.

The opposite is the case for end-user open-source software -- users are a fucking curse unless you can sell support and they're throwing money around. When your users contribute it's by generally by giving crap cargo-cult advice on disparate web forums, if you're lucky they'll use email lists to complain and bike-shed, if you're real lucky they'll design terrible themes for your app using copyright-infringing artwork. They'll do marketing for you, but they'll base it on the features you hate, bring in more digg/reddit/lifehacker 'power user' types, and promote pointless forks.