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.