Sometimes this is the case, but other times the pressure is from the point of view of wanting to work in a field that stays interesting. If you enjoy fiddling with computers - to the extent that your work is your hobby as well - you want to be able to fiddle with as much source code, as many cool ideas, as possible. I know I'd rather be building infrastructure on top of Bonobo and GNOME, where I can dig at will into the source code, than on top of COM and Windows, where I'll end up screaming in frustration at another untraceable bug.
Once you've tasted the freedom of open source development in an environment like a university, you don't want to 'grow up' and enter the corporate 'real world' very much.
Of course, the lack of reflexivity is a big thing - but then, that's at least as common in the 'closed source' community as in the open source one. And in my experience, that lack is pretty solidly there amongst all levels of computer people, not just coders.
Peter P.S. I know a lot of geeks who have no time for the 'elite' posturing. People who use numbers as letters, in my experience, aren't particularly good coders. -- Peter van Heusden <pvh at egenetics.com> NOTE: I do not speak for my employer, Electric Genetics "Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower." - Karl Marx, 1844