Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 34

All companies with investors are evil, make no mistake.

They may have nice looking save the world charity campaigns, but once you get even close to affecting their revenue stream, the axe falls. The charity is only a publicity stunt to reduce wages.

Some level of government intervention is needed to control investor's greed.

It is just a question of business model: some business models are eviler than others. Making people pay for operating systems being possible the most evil of all.

One thing must be said however. You can learn a lot by working in a good company, because it ends up putting you in contact with practical real problems that you wouldn't otherwise see by just doing your own random low-tech startup. This is especially valuable if said company is also enlightened enough to use and contribute back to open source software, thus improving the world and paying back the moral debt of using other people's work for free.

Another important point to consider is who in the company is evil. In a sane tech company, the lowly engineers are going to be non-evil. And then the more you go up the management chain, the more aligned you have to be with investors, and thus the more and more evil you get. HR is just evil from the bottom though, it's just the nature of their job.

The financial industry does not serve society nowhere near its magnitude (London of course being the epitome of that). It serves only itself. It just grows without bound.