A large part of open source advocates out there do not fall into the Free Software Foundation-camp, or into the Open Source Initiative camp. In fact, it may seem that they completely lack any "ideology" in regard to using and developing free software. The good guys conducing some CHANGELOG and Linux Weekly News interviews dubbed them "in for free beer".
What they essentially say is that free software is fun and cool. They use it because it gets their job done better, and may possibly contribute to it because it is fun and enjoyable to do so, and brings many side-benefits. They're into the free software movement to get practical values, and not out of believing it is more moral or necessarily superior to non-free one.
The most prominent open source activist who belongs to this group is Linus Torvalds. He illustrated this point in this post to the Linux-Kernel Mailing List in regard to the BitKeeper issue:
I would suggest that if you are silently seething about the fact that a commercial product can do something better than a free one, how about doing something about it?
Quite frankly, I don't want people using Linux for ideological reasons. I think ideology sucks. This world would be a much better place if people had less ideology, and a whole lot more "I do this because it's FUN and because others might find it useful, not because I got religion" [ideo].
The "In for free beer" ideology is a complete anti-thesis to the belief propagated in the Free Software Foundation's Philosophy section, and held by Richard Stallman and many other individuals. While we do not claim that using or hacking on Free Software is not a good thing, we also don't have anything against proprietary software. Generally, our advocates use free software because it is superior to the corresponding non-free one, cheaper, or otherwise better for what they wish to accomplish. While the fact that it is free may have helped in making it so, it is not held in importance by itself.
On the other hand, use of non-free or not entirely free software or contribution to it is not considered a bad action. We see proprietary software as equally as legitimate as open-source one, as it is a tool that took a lot of work, and aims to give service to its users. Demanding a price for it is equally as legitimate, as giving it away for free and/or allowing to modify it.
While some vendors of proprietary software have known to be "abusive" to their customers at a point in some way (and some still are), "in for free beer" advocates don't believe it is a necessity of the fact that the software is proprietary. By all means, the opposite is the fact for many vendors out there. That is, and it is not entirely unlikely that a developer of open source software will mistreat his users as well. This has more to do with the policy that a vendor or developer adopts in this regard, than with whether the software is open source or not.
In short: "use, code and be happy". And please leave me alone, if I'm using something that stands against your belief system. Our advocates tend to be less loud than advocates of Stallmanism or Raymondism, partly because they shun away from advocacy and prefer productive decisions and code. Nevertheless, there are many of them, some even very prominent positions (Tim O'Reilly, Larry Wall and like I said Linus Torvalds to name a few).
It's time that the open source world would not seem like it is dominated by stubborn free software fanatics. We like to use free software we may like to work on it, and we highly appreciate those that do. But there's a long way to deducing that proprietary software is immoral from here. Non-religious open source people of the world unite!
I like this quote very much, but I think Torvalds made a mis-use of the word "ideology", but one that is very common. In my opinion, ideology denotes a value-system that is objective and would be agreed upon by a man of any culture. It is not and never is harmful.
Similarly, I call people such as Linus Torvalds idealists, since they did not harm anyone while creating tremendous values to society.