Every time there is a MVP renewal there are always some tweets or posts from people not being re-awarded, but this New Year re-awarding cycle was different: a few vocal and prominent community members didn't get re-awarded. Most of them were MVPs because of their OSS projects, so conspiracy theories started about Microsoft dropping his support to Open Source, and the bashing game started.
Contributes to the community because you like it, not because of the incentives
You should contribute to the community because you love doing it. Not because of the incentives MS gives you with the MVP program.
I love doing what I do for the community (books, articles, my blog, speeches, managing a user group, organizing UG meetings) and I would do the same even without the MVP program, because I love sharing my experience and my knowledge and my passion.
Everybody should do the same, for the same reasons.
If you do it for getting the MVP logo on you business card you'll be disappointed: the benefits MS gives to MVPs are almost nothing compared to the effort put into becoming and maintaining the award. What I think is the real value of the MVP is being able to help product teams with your observations of what is the real world outside Redmond.
Of course the MVP program has its problems (which I'll explain later), but they are not relevant if you do your contributions to the community for the sake of it, and not for becoming a MVP.
What is the MVP program
A lot has already been said about the MVP program, and how people are evaluated: basically it boils down to filling a report with all the things you did to contribute to the MS community: speeches, books, articles, blog posts, user-group activities, forum participation, OSS contributions and so on. And the the MVP lead of the region will evaluate your contributions compared to all the other candidates. So if you fill in this report without care (like Keyvan that said he added in 5 minutes only the 25% of his contributions) or your contributions are less compared to the other candidates, you are not getting the award. And it's also probably true that, since MVP leads are not technical persons, they might not be able to give the right importance to contributions to a famous .NET OSS library. Probably this should change, especially now that the strategy of Microsoft is moving more and more to OpenSource (in the DevDiv at least).
It is also true that MVP, Most Valuable Professional, might not reflect the new meaning of the program: maybe it was when it was created in the '90s, but now nothing proves a MVP is someone that adopts the best practices and his a great developer. As said a few lines above, MVPs are people that contribute to the community. Maybe the name should be changed to "Community Champions" or something similar.
Disclaimer: Before becoming a MVP I had attacked the program for lack of transparency. Since then, the transparency increased a bit, and despite my attack they awarded me anyway, so this proves personal opinions are not taken into account when awarding MVPs