"One of the reasons I worked so hard on open source projects was to make job interviews easier."
Well, that shouldn't be the primary reason to work on open source projects.
I don't know his background; however, most people I know have exactly opposite experiences with regard to open source. But I wouldn't hire anyone either who would try to impress me like that.
I have interviewed people recently with the same view.
They pushed their (admittedly good) OS projects at us heavily as examples of their greatness. But it was quickly apparent their interest was held only as long as it was useful to their job prospects (aka no passion) and that these projects were covering a lack of technical ability for the job in hand.
We used OS projects as a benchmark to see how well someone deals with bugs, user feedback, community and support issues. The code is fairly immaterial (ot a point) because you have no way of knowing how many man hours went into making it as good as it is....
The best programmer in the world is useless if it takes him a year to complete simple commerical projects ;)
Well, that shouldn't be the primary reason to work on open source projects.
I don't know his background; however, most people I know have exactly opposite experiences with regard to open source. But I wouldn't hire anyone either who would try to impress me like that.