The beauty of open source development is I can do it in my free time, and because I want to. Often times having open source development on your resume is simply a way to show you're a motivated developer and to demonstrate the quality of the code you produce. I'm not sure it can be directly compared against an unpaid internship, apples and oranges.
Right, but part of the question is, if unpaid internships are so bad, what about mentored open source development? How can one draw a line?
From my perspective, hiring people in related open source technologies means little ramp-up time development-wise, it means seeing someone who has a somewhat entrepreneurial spirit, and the like, all on top of the benefits of unpaid internships.
