To me, an unpaid internship can make sense if you're making coffee and hoping to absorb some experience/wisdom from the bankers/lawyers/whoever you're working for. But if you're someone with actual skills (e.g. " a UI/UX guru and/or a strong coder with PHP, Java, Flex, .NET, Ruby/Rails, or Javascript skills"), making an actual contribution, you should be paid.
I agree with you 100%, and my reply nearly included that if one believes in free markets then one can't call it unethical. The only thing that gives me pause is that interns are often young and inexperienced and may not realize that their skills have value. While the burden of such education is on the interns (intern candidates, young 'uns, hackstars, whatever), it still seems morally questionable to me for companies to intentionally exploit that inexperience.
I wholeheartedly agree with your sentiment, however I think the intention (if not the wording) of the gp is that hackers should skip past this opportunity if they actually have marketable skills or that hackers should expect compensation/equity if they are "gurus and/or strong coders."
I agree to an extent. But what if you just want to learn and you DON'T have skills. I realize most people just teach themselves. Fine. I did that too. But there is a definite benefit to working with teams on programming projects that you wouldn't get otherwise unless you worked at a company...and most companies wouldn't pay you outright unless you had skills. So in this scenario, I think the unpaid internship idea makes sense.
