Interesting perspective but I have to say there are quite a few companies working the whole "open source the code, charge for consulting, etc." thing. Just in data alone, Cloudera, Data Stax, Basho, 10gen and Hortonworks come to mind.

My point is that thousands of people get paid to work on open source projects. The project might not be their original creation but they still get to give back by producing something that everyone can use. Isn't that really the point anyway?

EDIT: added a missing 'not'