No not harsh at all, but then again there is no need to soften opinions and comments anyway. Personally, I agree with your thoughts on helping the corporate interests for free, but there is a complex relationship between open source, open data, crowd developed services and democratizing the software economy. I believe it creates opportunity even as it gives development away.
I support this particular
HackFest for
open data because it is intended to illustrate to government the need to provide access to government --
read "our" -- data that taxpayers have already payed for. Convincing government to provide easy access to "our" data creates an environment of opportunity for the so called little guy -- that would be you Richard ;-).
There is also the altruistic argument of helping society if you should subscribe to that concept
Beer