No, it's not. The poor have no choice. Open source software is not
out there for the poor, it's out there because the developers don't
want to tie up their creativity by licensing limitations.
It's out there for a lot of reasons, many very crassly
commercial. When Sun makes the sources of Java JDK open source,
it's certainly not to avoid tieing up the their creativity.
Open source software is essentially free art
The words "open source" have essentially become an advertizing
gimmick, like "agile programming" or any number of other
expressions, which have lost all real meaning.
-- people donating their talent and their time to the progress
of the information technology, not to serve those who can't
buy commercial software.
And a lot of individuals on ego trips, convinced that what
they're doing is better than what anyone else is doing. There
are some well run open source projects (e.g. g++), but there are
hundreds of them which are just one or maybe two people "doing
their thing", with no regard of normal software engineering
issued. (Not that I'm against people doing their thing. But I
doubt that it's a good milieu for a beginner to work in.)
Note that running an open source project well is generally more
difficult than running a commercial project well (not that all
commercial organizations run their projects well), because you
don't locality; you can't generally get everyone together for a
meeting, etc. Which means that they're probably less well
equiped for monitoring beginners, and bringing them up to speed;
there is probably little place in an organization like the one
which produces g++ for someone who needs extensive hand holding.
