Is this not completely missing the point of the blog post? I didn't read it as saying you should never have someone doing the things you list, but as being about against a certain job spec that get's labelled as "community manager". The test outlined in point A was a pretty good one.
It's all well and good having a "pure" open source project; but at some point things become too big for someone to run in their spare time.
Really, it should be about having proper project governance. If a project is big enough, there should be some sort of board of directors with a combination of technical people and some representation from the user community, which is where I see "community managers" fitting in. Like it or not, the companies these community managers often represent ARE users of the product, and often provide funding to support open source projects. IMO, funding open source projects should absolutely get you "special treatment" because it incentivizes companies to support open source projects financially (see OpenSSL for what happens when they don't.)
Apache seems to run this model the best; but there are a lot of projects under their umbrella and some are run better than others. And it still depends heavily on the management skills of the project leads; but that seems to be what the development community wants.
Being a community manager for a large project can require a full-time effort, so why shouldn't it be a full-time job with a corresponding title and description? Sure, that person will have be paid by someone, but that doesn't mean they'll always favor corporate interests or that they have no accountability. Where I work (Red Hat) we have many people who work both as developers and community managers on "upstream" projects. Sometimes they really do seem to be working at cross-purposes to each other or to their corresponding "downstream" (commercial/paid) projects, and that's OK because we as a company have made a commitment to give them that freedom. Those who are community managers are accountable to their own bosses for the results they achieve upstream. I don't see how any of this is problamatic, let alone some sort of fraud or farce as the rather whiny OP claims. These people do a valuable job that benefits the upstream project, and they get paid for it. End of story.
