If you don’t get fat checks from an enterprisey company for your software work, should you care what they do and why?

A comment on David Pollak’s insightful The Impending Ruby Fracture argues why enterprises are just big black holes of suck to F/OSS coders, especially with regards to programming languages:

• they stick with positively ancient tools
• they don’t write good code
• they rarely contribute

Perhaps that’s an overgeneralization, but it matches my experience more often than not. The continual starry-eyed “Wow, Enterprise Software is Amazing and Only Real Men Programmers can make it” I hear from certain groups makes me yawn. Why spend so much time and effort producing software for a group unless you get some positive benefit from it?