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 ;)
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 ;)