Shouldn't a company's researchers research to improve their own products?

e.g. Intel.

Edison Chen.

I don't see any need to switch to linux except for research/coding/geek reasons, and none of these are for average users.

Microsoft, Xerox, Amazon AND Google all do something similar.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/17/apple-corporate-income-tax-rate_n_1429955.html

"Apple paid a top tax rate of just 9.8 percent in 2011, the report says. Google paid a rate of 11.9 percent, while Yahoo paid 11.6 percent and Microsoft paid 18.9 percent. Xerox paid 7.3 percent of its income in taxes, while Amazon paid only 3.5 percent, according to the report."

As far as I know, Google has been doing this for a long time (somewhere short after it's founded I presume?)

It is just how the corporation world goes with the current laws and regulations, nothing immoral. You can't stop companies from moving their manufacture to the low-labor-cost countries, similarly, you can't prevent the companies doing this to reduce the tax bill. As long as it can keep the company strong (by cutting cost) and is legal, they will (have to) do this to stay competitive and (more) profitable. It's like water will eventually settle to the lowest spot they can flow to.

Rooted phone + Market Enabler for the rescue. From Singapore.

GPL advocates itself as the agent of "freedom". However, what it brings is nothing close to freedom as far I can perceive - once you use GPLed code, you have no "freedom" what to do with your own code, but to make your code open-sourced, even in the case that large portion of it is completely unrelated to the GPLed code you've used, and what's more, your contribution is automatically GPLed, which makes the beast stronger, even you don't like or may even hate that. To me, it's "subjective-morality-enforcement" - forcing others to accept and comply what *you think* is right. Well, it is completely your freedom to believe that "Every piece of software should be open-sourced.", but you should not force others to accept and believe that philosophy, because it's subject to debate at least (while I personally think that statement is wrong). You _can_ use GPL as a weapon to achieve what you believe is right just as you can use AK47 to kill somebody who you think deserves bullets, but to say doing that is for "freedom", is absurd and hypocrite to me.