When I was in college I was a staunch supporter of Microsoft. I admired their sheer will power to steam roll into any market and garner the market share. Such power has to be backed by intelligence, perseverance and raw power.
On the other hand, I thought that the Linux, the flagship open source community project was run by a bunch of nerds and rebels; whose prime motive is opposition to power. These people will rebel against anyone in power. I installed Linux with much difficulty and found it ungainly. I was appalled when it prompted for the destination folder when I copied a file, I had give the destination folder immediately after I chose a copy operation. Later when I became a technology writer, one of my major work was on installing and uninstalling Linux. The article was assigned to me for my hatred towards Linux.
In a way I have switched campus; not because Microsoft kidnapped me and tortured me for teaching the public the easy steps to try Linux. But because my principles and values I respect have changed. The time since I joined college has been amazing. I felt like Alice in Wonderland. Except that I was also the rabbit hole. Earlier I admired the superiority and money power wielded by Microsoft. Now I think the open source community can produce more user focused software than any commercial organization.
Open Source communities like Mozilla, Linux and Apache have a community based approach. They are not free of monetary objectives. The 50 million dollar deal between Google and Mozilla sure raises a lot of eyebrows. But such communities will not have a marketing department that is very intrusive.
On one hand you have developers who are afraid that if they do a bad job they will be fired. On the other hand open source developers have only one objective produce what they think is the best code. I have chosen a convenient position. But I firmly believe that an community based developer is free to produce their best work. A MS developer working for Ubuntu should produce better work for the latter.
Now I think breaking MS into multiple companies will help us all and prevent a major bankrupcy.
Facebook/iLike is an example of how companies can have symbiotic relationship.
I don’t think there was any objection or anyone could object to having the IE tab extension in Firefox. But it took MS years to add Google as an option for the search engine into IE. This symbolizes how commercial establishments are different from a community based software.
I do not want companies to discard their monetary objectives and start philanthropic activities. They should be willing to sacrifice their objectives for those of the users. By such sacrifices they can gain the trust of their users. What can be more rewarding?