They are the antithesis of what I believe a technology company should be. Everything is closed source, locked down and designed to make maximum profit at the expense of the customer/developer/artist.
Fixed. Non-public companies can sometimes be an appropriate structure. E.g. the Mozilla Corporation: as a for-profit entity it can do a lot of things that the non-profit Mozilla Foundation can't, but it's 100% owned and completely controlled by the Foundation, and reinvests all profits back into the Mozilla project.
Also, if in the future open source becomes the norm, not the exception, then this will become moot -- the fact that a company is based on open-source will be considered typical, not an outlier.