Oh I agree entirely with you there. Forget the words bloatware, outsourcers and money for a minute... Surprisingly it's rarely the core products of the compan

Oh I agree entirely with you there. Forget the words bloatware, outsourcers and money for a minute... Surprisingly it's rarely the core products of the companies that are problematic. It's usually the army of consultants and cash backhanders (the enterprise lot) who come wading in to pillage everyone. That's where the bad rep comes from. They build half-arsed products on top of these platforms which everyone comes to hate. Regarding open-source talent; much as it is anywhere else, it's hard to come by. In fact a lot of the open source software out there is considerably worse than the closed source stuff that I've seen over the years. There are a few gems here and there for example the FreeBSD operating system, LLVM, valgrind, postfix, postgresql etc but the vast majority is total half-baked shit. I include a big chunk of GNU in that as well which is shameful. The vast majority of commercial software is total shit too. Regardless of that, the core of Windows and even Java (but not SAP - I've had my fair share of integration there) are good products. Just don't go and grab piles of enterprise integration junk on top and it's fine. That, IMHO, is where all the pain comes from and why people have such hatred. Hatred is infectious as well. It takes experience to distinguish justified hatred and rumors.