First off, great writeup! However, I have to disagree with the above point. Google has shown not only great innovation, but also marvelous contributions to the OSS community. These come in the form of: - Google wave - Chromium - V8 - O3D - Summer of Code - Android (carriers can close bits, but it is oss) - Books (yes, the kind you read, the worlds largest library?) - Gears - etc Plus they contribute to industry driving oss projects like Hadoop and its tools (yahoo is by far the primary contributer). Now, I'm sure there are many motivations for improving the bottom line, but google has been a very visible proponent of oss. This is good as they're helping to set the trend, and because of their size, this is an influence that we all feel. }:^)~