When I first started working on software during college I never worked with others or read into open source. After a diving deeply into many technologies and working with others I can say that we as developers might have more in common with artists and musicians than what the mass media might be portraying.
The constant telling of programmers being left minded and artists and musicians being right minded I feel is a false statement. I believe the interconnection of ideas and construction of a framework is just as artistic as painting or writing a masterful piece of music. After working with a very open minded and knowledgeable developer. He opened my eyes to many different technologies and open source.
I worked on a couple open sourced technologies which you can find on my github, but this is not what I am writing about. I am writing about how amazing all the open source technologies can teach you so much. After reading over many different open source works you can get a sense of how a developer thinks and how he might go about his next step. This can also lead to predictable errors which can help with debugging. However this can also said to the unpredictable developer.
Looking at many of your posts of your open source work I have seen some pretty thoughtful ideas that have even influenced my ideas of good coding practices. The collective work of everyone helping each other is nothing more than fantastic.
To the main point though. I would hope that more developers think of themselves as great artists. And that artists might think of their art as masterful articulated human expressionism. We as developers can express our thought into computer emulation while artists can express their thoughts into the physical realm. Even so, with many technologies even bridging the cap between the developer and artist the stigma of left brained engineer will soon be seen as the insightful developer. And the artist as the intellectual that they are.
I marvel at some code architecture and also say, "heck I could do that". Just the same as I would at works of art. Greatness of anything is amazing. And I thank you all for your work in this community.