http://euobserver.com/political/125868
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_Ventures
http://www.networkworld.com/article/2466540/software/munich-...
And on and on.
Would you use a google product? They are double-faced went in come to net neutrality, only putting their weight on points that promote their own benefit. They also buy up tons of extremely innovative start-ups, then suffocate them under the weight of their glacial bureaucracy and pedantic squabbling.
I could go on all day.
As for Google, that's the hard one to avoid. Adsense/Adwords is easy, youtube is hard (plenty of video content is only available on youtube), google search is still better than duckduckgo (and I'm really sorry about that, but I'm rooting for Gabriel to achieve parity some day even if that's an uphill battle), and I use Google docs for a few spreadsheets that I need to be able to access remotely.
My mail is on my own server, web stuff is classical 'LAMP', I don't use webkit, don't use V8 and I don't think I have an instance of CUPS here that is actually configured to do real work but it's possible that I'm missing a machine clever enough to auto-configue.
Other hardware is Dell, Synology (which has CUPS on board but it's not in use) and a variety of smaller fry.
It's really not all that hard to keep the big companies out of your life, one of these days I'll find a way to get rid of google completely. The most frequently used closed source product I have is Varicad (but they have a nasty little gotcha that I recently found out about so they're on the way out) and another is adobe acrobat reader (the linux version). Oh, and the Nvidia binary drivers for the graphics card in this box.
With NVIDIA drivers you probably have at least some LLVM compiled components (or will have, once their transition has been completed in future generations), but I give you that one. As a GPGPU developer for example, you probably soon can't get around LLVM anymore and I expect its influence to grow in the Linux world, as it has become the default choice to build new OSS compiler / language projects around.
I'm using DDG myself btw. - Google is the main one I'd like to get away from, but as you wrote it's very hard. At least DDG with "g!" prefix makes me anonymous to them.
What I still find very hard to replace is Skype and/or Hangout - I'm not aware of an OSS solution that works on all platforms and that I can easily set up with all kinds of peers (including non computer literate). Even Hangout is way too complicated, even for aged computer scientists I've found. And I'm really using all of it - VoIP, video conferencing, Skype-Out, screen sharing, messaging. This is the main thing I'd like to replace since we're handing out so much control to this tool.
Also, do you only use older CUPS versions because Apple pays its development for a while now?
2. Regarding the 2nd link - MS has no control over IV's business, unless you have evidence otherwise. And that too, it's "unclean" only to the extent that you believe patents are evil, which is unfortunately an all-too-common view around here.
3. Regarding the 3rd link - see 1.
http://www.eversheds.com/global/en/what/articles/index.page?...
Of course that has absolutely nothing to do with Muenchen switching back to MS.
Sure, but it really depends on what and how much. Microsoft made their fortune by being ethically bankrupt and breaking the law. If the Mafia decided to reform today and go legit, it would be a long hard slough before anybody would actually trust them. And if they kept extortion as a side business, it would make it very hard to believe anything they have to say, regardless of the amount of money they give to charity.
I don't want it to be an optimal business strategy to be evil to maximise growth, and then become nice once evil no longer pays off. Holding a grudge longer than might seem strictly logical is my way of pushing in that direction :-).