I basically have all the collaborators that I need, for the projects that I'm working on, but I think that it is a great thing, to encourage altruistic development.

It is my experience, that free work should be as good as (or better than) paid work. This is code quality, executable quality, documentation and support quality, user experience quality, etc.

I have found that many altruistic projects have great heart, but can sometimes fall short, in quality. Maybe as a result (or maybe it's a cause), they are often not taken seriously by the people that could most use them, and this can also make it difficult to get folks to take high-quality work seriously (I have a lot of experience with that).

When looking for collaborators. Tecchies often seek out engineers, but maybe they are better served, seeking out advocates, artists/designers, writers, testers and integrators.

In my experience, recruiting evangelists in the user community is incredibly valuable (and difficult; especially if "people skills" aren't our top talents).

We can also do damage, by pissing off these folks (I have done that). Free/Open/Altruistic projects can often be rather fragile, as motivation and engagement are the currencies we use. These are easy to dismiss or denigrate, when we are used to the traditional motivators of paid work.