Is OpenSource betraying its principles?

This morning, driving to my office, I was thinking about what George Orwell could have written if he was currently alive.

Sometimes I feel like the “last man” of his 1984’s novel, under the government of the OpenSource Big Brother. The OBB always told me that we were fighting an epic war against the horrible army of the Commercial enemy. We were the pure, we brought salvation to people oppressed by the big companies, brandishing the new flag of a completely new idea of Software.

Software must not be payed. Software can be easily modified and re-distributed. Everybody can make use of open software without having to pay for that. People is important, not business. This is what they said to me.

And now? Well… I thought I was still fighting the same battle, but what’s happened? OpenSource is lead by big Companies! OpenSource software is becoming over-complicated so that you have to pay for a lot of things: books, support and so on…  There are a big lot of standards so that you are really not free anymore in your programming job. Small companies still buy software from big companies, as before the battle. They do not pay for the software itself, but they still have to pay for making the software work for them: customizations, support, hundred of books etc.

Don’t know… maybe something has gone wrong… maybe closed source was not the evil…