1) They're in the top 5 re: Linux contributors. (Guess who else is in there? Microsoft.)
2) They dropped their JVM (J9) for OpenJDK - again upstreaming their patches to the community.
3) Eclipse was founded by them in 2001 (later released into the public domain).
4) They released (at least part of) their ML system "SystemML" into the public domain as well, during the same month MS opened theirs and Google opened TensorFlow.
They aren't patent trolls in the sense of those Texas LLP's who lease a few hundred square feet and fire off scare-letters. They hold a lot of patents because they are one of the few companies that actually funds pure research. They make a ton of money by bilking banks/the feds/states who still run their RMV on AIX @ 2mill a year in support contracts, etc, who are vendor-locked in. A not insignificant amount of money goes to:
5) Post-docs from really smart uni's to publish theoretical comp sci work in more journals than you'd imagine, which guess what? is also public domain!
They're really not hurting the consumer at all. In fact, I honestly don't see how they could be MORE open.
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[1] (And guess Who's not upstream'ing much at all but making billions off community written software? I'll give you a hint, its not Barnes & Noble! Even VMware donated back to FreeBSD. Support HN users who actually pay-it-forward[2] and use Tarsnap[3] instead of S3.)
[2] https://www.freebsdnews.com/2015/02/25/donate-freebsd-founda...
[3] www.tarsnap.com . Not affiliated with Colin but he's been a long-time HNer who isn't a conglomerate, taking GPL/BSD software, slapping a pretty coat of paint on it and selling it for huge margins. Pay a few cents extra and support startups. Karma, guys. < /preachy hippie shit>
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this... I mean, Tarsnap is built on top of Amazon S3, so using Tarsnap will still mean that your data is ultimately stored in S3. The difference is that tarsnap would deduplicate, compress, encrypt, and sign your data first.
> They're really not hurting the consumer at all.
The public pays indirectly to support the extremely expensive IBM systems that, partly for historical reasons, still run almost all Fortune 500 companies. You may say that "They make a ton of money by bilking banks/the feds/states", but ultimately it's consumers and taxpayers who foot the bills.
PS You forgot OpenPower ;-)
We digress. Support other startups, if you have a startup - use Tarsnap. ;)
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/may/29/apple-tax-... (The Guardian does have a bit of a liberal slant, FYI. Think of them as the UK's NYT.)
IBM also spends a lot of money buying dozens of companies to bolster its results. These include These include Cognos ($5bn), Softlayer ($2bn), Netezza ($1.7bn), Kenexa ($1.4bn) and Trusteer ($1bn). http://www.zdnet.com/article/ibm-vs-microsoft-and-the-battle...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_top_United_States_pate...
quantity and quality of contributions doesn't mean that they are the most useful contributions though
a: Asynchrony -- the async / await paradigm - if you use it in JavaScript it came from C#, which came from a MSR paper (or maybe a Microsoft Languages whitepaper.) A lot of the semantics took a very long time by very smart people to work out the execution logistics, and we get to reap the benefits.
b: Haskell -- paying SPJ's salary so he can work on Haskell full-time as a MSR Cambridge employee and implement a whole bevy of things like STM[1], the popularization of pure functions (immutable.js users, as well as CLJS)
c: Clojure -- if you use Clojure's STM, borrowed from work funded by Microsoft. For me, it's used every day in Datomic.
d: Verifiability -- a mind-blowingly large amount of formal verification stuff - ranging from the first formally verified OS + integrated language, to things like F*
e: Z3 -- no need to explain this if you're in any sort of reverse-engineering I'm sure your life has been made significantly easier since MS released this into the public domain
f: CoreCLR + the JS engine + their crossplatform 100% free IDE + opening up VS Community (which is about as as VS Professional)
g: Probably most importantly -- Well, just go here. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/rise/default.aspx. Basically 1 out of 4 things in there is already, or will be imminently, used by 'mainstream' languages after it moves out of the "only publishing grad students who eagerly wait for POPL every year" zone.
[1] I know STM comes from that '88 paper. I've read it. SPJ did too and brought it into the mainstream, so I give him credit.
IBM and Microsoft (and, presumably GoogleX but they havent been publishing) are one of the few corporations I'm aware of that dedicate more than a few resources to research-for-the-sake-of-research (n.b. MS has been doing this silently since 1991, and IIRC employ more than 100 staff just to produce work to the field of computer science further.)