On first read, I was going to ask to get a link to that thesis, thinking it was some Masters or PhD work. Every 10 years you&#x27;re going to have the &#x27;big-evil&#x27;.  I&#x27;m with you 100% about it being standard practices in big companies, and 110% about users being complacent about accepting the walled garden.<p>Also re: patents- IBM has a huge patent portfolio. Very little of it is used to patent troll. Those boxed-office Texas shell LLP law-firms setup are nothing like what IBM is doing today (second only behind Red Hat in terms of core Linux kernel commits, IIRC[caveat: source was from a talk I attended in 2013 by one of the 3 upstream-controllers, including Linus]). &quot;Evil 80s IBM&quot; is now actually too stagnant to really exploit the consumer and barely breathing off of old banks and gov&#x27;t systems that run System&#x2F;36,360,38,390 on z&#x2F;OS.<p>&quot;Evil 90s MS&quot; is now opening up basically everything for the consumer, minus the cash-cows (enterprises). MS Research funds tons of Haskell research, language development that gradually goes from PhD&#x2F;post-doc work -&gt; &quot;obscure&quot; languages like Haskell&#x2F;F# -&gt; C# (LINQ is effectively a monad). Python 3.5&#x27;s new async&#x2F;await is largely influenced by work Microsoft did (both in semantics and syntax). The CoreCLR is on Github. Inspect, modify, alter, run your F# code on a RS&#x2F;6000 or 8 dollar ARM if you want to. Visual Studio Community Edition is free, a la the IntelliJ model.  I argue they&#x27;re now a net positive on the community. Just like IBM, they&#x27;ve realized the enterprise is where their money is, so charge for SQL Server licenses (which are really reasonably priced compared to Oracle), Sharepoint, Server, and Dynamics&#x2F;Biztalk type stuff.<p>In the 80s it was IBM. In the 90s it was MS. Today, Apple performing so much walled-gardened anti-competitive practices (I can&#x27;t install my legally purchased copy of OS X on my Intel machine? Really?) that it makes the MS DOJ trial look completely insignificant.