IBM is the line. Their participation in the OSS community is very active and positive. See IBM's developerworks as examples as to how the largest organization

IBM is the line. Their participation in the OSS community is very active and positive. See IBM's developerworks as examples as to how the largest organizations can participate in the open source community and not try to take direct control. Now, IBM's motive is to most likely bundle services around those OSS implementations, so they profit from that. On the other hand, we have Oracle who outright acquires OSS organizations just to wrap sales and maintenance around the products. They'll trickle in funding to barely nurture the products along, only to have the founders/leaders of those projects bail when they realize what is really happening. That results in the mass resignations that we see with MySQL and countless other Sun OSS acquisitions. And don't get me started on Java. :(