Out of curiosity, is it fair to assume you use hardware and software by a source you consider more ethical then? (your classification above rules out Apple and Google as well since they've both done less-than-stellar things )
Part of my current contract is migrating a customer away from SQL Server to Postgres, and it feels good. Automating powershell on aws instances doesn't feel so good, but it's temporary pain.
Typically, if someone hates Microsoft, they love either Apple or Google. That's been my experience at least.
Apple (Worst Offender but also helped Open Source at times)
Microsoft M$ (Middle of the road with it always depending on who you spoke with at the company)
Google (Most powerful of the three in terms of control over people's lives if they wanted it, but I seriously think they stumble ethically not on purpose. I believe they try to follow, "Don't be evil" as a whole)
That said, the Google+ real names insanity removed all my trust in the company's products at that level, and I'm only now considering doing business with them due to their low cost of cloud storage and trusting them at the technical and operational levels more than Amazon.
> Google... stumble ethically not on purpose.
Stumbling? When they ripped off Sun, they did so with deliberately and with awareness at the highest levels. There are emails revealed during the trial that leave no doubt.
Also, of all the companies engaged in all the smartphone patents wars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone_patent_wars), Google (via Motorola) was the only company that was actually found guilty of abusing patents: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/09/4-billion-motorol...
Pretty rich coming from a company that accused everyone else of abusing patents.
> When they ripped off Sun
Than why did Sun's CEO congratulate them? Sun also loves to rip off people look at Oracles' Unbreakable Linux AKA Redhat Linux.
I seriously have 30+ years of Apple hatred from before my Amiga days. Amiga community HATED Apple for their business practices and clear lack of innovation. I went to buy a Mac with my dad when released and my dad say the writing on the wall. Lies and more lies and Lisa wasn't more powerful just more expensive and you still sell those?
How do you explain things like this then?
http://www.businessinsider.com/google-skyhook-emails-2011-5?...
That's exactly what Microsoft is accused of doing.
That they were HUGELY upset that they would lose a data collection stream? Or that they were trying to figure out what to do? Android as a service has requirements or you can make a Fire Phone like Amazon did with the Open Source code of the product doesn't seem like M$.
You can explain what I am missing but the fact that we have Amazon Fire Phone and Fire Tablets all based on a fork of Android seems to kill the implications of these emails.