Is success ruining open source?

The charm of the cash-poor open source movement was you couldn't be fired. Everyone was a volunteer. You could take this code and fork it.

But with corporate-run communities like Sun's OpenJDK, even other corporations wonder if that's the case any more. Someone drives the bus, and everyone else (even Red Hat) becomes a passenger.

Red Hat's own brain drain also begs the question. Project leaders leave, taking their passion and code sense with them, yet the project moves on, led by whoever the boss has chosen. Isn't that the way the proprietary world works?

Matt Asay today has great praise for soccer's Cesc Fabregas, whom he imagines as a great coder. But Fabregas, the scheme he plays, and his Arsenal teammates are all creatures of Arsene Wenger (above), a great executive, and the business risk-takers who built a new stadium to increase their profits.

The point is that while open source can reform business practices, making them more transparent, and placing new pressures on management to provide for workers and customers, it does not replace the business model.

What appears to be a revolution from the inside is only corporate evolution in action.