He's asking valid questions. I'd ask a succint question: what features can make it more productive to me in comparison with, say, Windows 7 desktop?
> There is no motivation or desire on the part of the developers to sell anything to you,
This I disagree with. Why else would they made it available for download? (They might not be marketing the software, but they are marketing something -- e.g., their coding skills.)
These points have already been addressed by others but I'll elaborate further.
This is simply a different culture and perspective. I know that in business we primarily tend to think of things in terms of the value they provide. The motivation behind OSS projects rarely has anything to do with personal profit. They tend to happen because someone is trying to address a personal need and decides to share their solution with the world, or they just want to create something cool for the sake of it or they're trying to learn a new technology and need something to practice on. It's like charity - you don't advertise the fact that you do it, you just help out and hope that it makes a difference. Personally, I think that people only really try to sell things when there is an expectation of exchange - when something is being given away for free, what is the motivation for marketing it? Why would you waste time talking about the result of doing the things you love to do instead of doing them?
I think that this is where the notion of marketing being a force of evil comes from - if something is being sold, it's because someone is trying to convince you to give up something you have. It is inherently selfish. OSS is the opposite - it's selfless - you give without the expectation of getting (yet in real terms you get many orders of magnitude more than you put in - something which just doesn't happen in the business world). It's like a pyramid scheme which actually works.
> They tend to happen because someone is trying to address a personal need
This I understand and do not contend.
> and decides to share their solution with the world
This is marketing, not necessarily for the money. It may be for recognition (yeah, I too know the "high" feeling when somebody comes to you and says you're doing something cool); for the hope that more people will join in so you get to be the leader; for having a non-trivial (hopefully) successful project to put on the CV; to feel yourself useful to the community, etc, etc.
Bottom line: when you make something publicly available, you're marketing it. You're "selling" your product in exchange for some of the immaterial goods (see above) that you can get only from other people.
> This I disagree with. Why else would they made it available for download? (They might not be marketing the software, but they are marketing something -- e.g., their coding skills.)
Speaking as someone who has developed and released open source software, I can tell you why: because it's damn cool when other people find your code useful. An added bonus is that they sometimes send patches. I'm certainly not getting rich from it (in the form of job offers or other things).
Plug: I'm a committer on a tiling WM written in python which is also gearing up for release soon: http://qtile.org
This I disagree with. Why else would they made it available for download? (They might not be marketing the software, but they are marketing something -- e.g., their coding skills.)
I highly doubt that marketing their coding skills is why the Enlightenment developer(s) started writing OSS.
> There is no motivation or desire on the part of the developers to sell anything to you,
This I disagree with. Why else would they made it available for download? (They might not be marketing the software, but they are marketing something -- e.g., their coding skills.)