Yes, this is the main reason for doing "cloud" I believe. Otherwise, it would make no sense for someone like Adobe to adopt this model, since the softwares still largely require to run locally for technical reasons.

It's the same thing as the subscriptions for movies like Netflix, except at least in the last case we can fight back with various means (and it's not a necessity).

The SaaS model is basically a perfect racketeering setup, I think it should be outlawed at least philosophically. There is no way business is not going to abuse that power and they have already shown as much...

I agree with your sentiment on Open Source. I think like many of these types of things, it lives in contradictions. In any case, Linux as it is today, couldn't exist without the big commercial players paying quite a bit to get it going.