BulldogLowell:
??If one wants to make money, why not seek the lowest cost solution? If you could get a decent haircut for free, wouldn't you?
BTW, Arduino itself is a commercial enterprise... do you feel bad about your time spent enriching their company/principals/employees supporting their products?
Well, the issue has become split now that we know that the "boss" is really a wife or something like that... 
I do support Arduino directly, I contributed money when I downloaded the IDE. It does not contradict my ideology to support a company (with my forum contributions) that seems to honour open source principles and doesn't seem to embrace the cannibalistic trade practices of many others. They seem to recognize their proper role in the ecosystem that they have created, and don't engage in aggressive IP battles to my knowledge. They don't seem to be milking patents instead of innovating the way some other companies do.
The issue of requesting help is a matter of degree. If a good engineer encounters a stumbling block and goes to forums for answers, I have no problem with it. That is properly utilizing the online resource of community knowledge to increase their own. In the ideal internet paradigm, they will pay it back someday by helping someone else in a similar way. Such an environment need not discriminate between employees, students, and hobbyists.
However this doesn't look so good when it's stretched to include an incompetent pretender who is merely exploiting the anonymity of the web to engage knowledgeable people to perform the work which their managers believe they are doing. That is unprofessional unless they disclose their actual situation.
There is nothing wrong with accepting a free haircut, per se. But parking my Mercedes, putting my suit on the rack, donning ragged clothes and going to stand in line with needy people for one if that were the purpose for the offer, wouldn't be moral.