Agreed. I do think, however, that FOSS contributors may get some "social capital" from contributing (approval from the cool crowd, putting it on their resume and walking employers through what they did) that I doubt would go to some dude who spent 100 hours researching and finding an old patent or publication that kills a patent. Though I may be wrong.
You are being misguided for the same reason in both FOSS and this patent thing.
You just cannot see that for many people it's their genuine interest.
I know plenty of open source contributors and most of them do not give two damns about social capital or resume (some don't even work in software, but contribute to OS), they just like solving problems with code.
