They're the only company with the means to take on such massive, unprofitable projects, and at the same time enough street cred that everyone won't immediately assume they're trying to make the web proprietary. The fact that they tend to open up these things from the get go helps, too.
They are hardly the only company doing this. Microsoft Research do a ton of pretty visionary / far-reaching work, much of which has nothing to do with MS-proprietary platforms. For example, the VL2 architecture for data center networks: http://sns.cs.princeton.edu/2009/10/new-datacenter-networks/
This makes me uncomfortable.
You just don't trust your money to an apparently unarmed bank-robber.
As for licensing, Microsoft owns the said IP and can re-license it on a whim.
Not all of Microsoft is evil, but they, as a company, cannot be trusted to behave in a civilized manner.
AFAIK, the Simons publish research papers freely, and GHC is licensed under what amounts to a BSD3 license (by the University of Glasgow... not Microsoft).
I wonder if Microsoft will one day redeem themselves to the public like IBM did?
I don't regard the shameful approval of OOXML as an ISO standard, and all the questionable things Microsoft did in order to accomplish it, as a particularly nice thing to do. There are a lot of NBs that were formed specifically for that purpose that were never again heard from. As it is now, the damage to ISO seems irreversible.
Also, there is the trolling about "Linux infringes 4 bazillion of our patents" empty threats (because if they weren't empty they would have acted) and the failed attempt to sell some of those patents to trolls that would go after Linux users. The fact if failed (because a non-invited group won the auction and donated the patents) makes it not less evil.
No. Being evil is in their soul.
They may be less evil now - I can agree on that. But it's so much more because they are far less relevant now than they were in the 90s than any particular change of heart.
They deserve no redemption.
I think the important thing to note is that Google is the only large company whose business model depends almost completely on the success of the Internet.
This is why we see them at bat for Net Neutrality as well as efficiencies within communication protocols.
Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, HP, IBM . . . those companies make their livings in other ways.
The only company comparable to Google would be Yahoo in this way. Their inability to keep engineering talent means their contribution to The-Internet-As-Platform is not as significant.
IE. Imagine a personal computer market with no way for computers to communicate with each other, would users be still buying computers as much as they do now or would it be just a small niche market?
Even though there are several big players whose business model depends quite a bit on the internet, yet no other tech companies does as much as to improve the internet as Google does. The icing on the cake is that Google opens up and shares most of these projects to everyone for free.
Google may be the biggest company whose success depends upon the Internet, but they're far from the only one.