I fully agree, open source is incredibly underutilized. When it works well it can be extremely powerful. Take for instance the recent flipper zero kickstarter/product. It’s finally shopping and even though it’s very incomplete there’s already a vibrant community of hackers tinkering with it.

I feel the same disappointment as you. As a child I envisioned a world where I could go work at somewhere like Google and truly use their resources to give back but every project seems in some way tainted by the underlying drive to make everything profitable for the company funding it.