Are ALL the applications collaborative? Do they all involve DIY?
From what I gather, the vast majority of open source software users will never look at the source. (This is merely a personal opinion.) I'd also say that not everything involves DIY, though it is possible... Basically, you decide your own level of involvement.
I brainstormed that:
- famous open source examples are linux and firefox. It was spun out of a corporate entity, and everyone uses it, even nontechnical users.
-Emacs: more estoric application. It's a text editor mostly used by programmers and other power users, and most installations of it are heavily customized because it actively invites that feedback
From a legal perspective, there are two main schools of open source licencing/copyright. There is the GPL - GNU public licence. This says that a) you can't sell the code for profit b) you must provide the source code to any end users if you modify and distribute it. There's the BSD licence, which has it's roots in the Berkely Standard Distribution of unix (not *legally* unix, it must be noted, but unix in the sense that it's a unix-flavoured and compatible system. AT&T own the trademark "UNIX"). It says that the code under it is free, do whatever you want... BSD licenced code can be taken, changed, and sold for a profit under a different licence -- it's simply considered polite to contribute your code back to the project.
I suppose the lesson in all this ambiguity is, GO TO YOUR TUTORIALS.
References:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html
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