I'm not sure if you were summarizing or disagreeing with me, but I mostly agree with you, except that I think the "work for someone else for free" part is spin. It's not totally inaccurate, it just mischaracterizes the goals and practicalities of the work. The goal isn't to make something useful to commercial entities, it's to make something useful to anybody (or, more likely in my case, nobody). Working for someone also implies that they control the design and direction of the work, but one of the huge draws of open source work is that you are able to design and direct it however you want. If someone likes your design and direction, they can use it, but they can't tell you what to do.
