Most of the time you're maintaining code you're maintaining bad code, though, and it's pretty rare that I run across a perl program with "use strict" turned on. But if I don't see it, I at least know what I'm up against. The newer languages need a similar "A bad programmer wrote this" flags.
* You know who you are
It's funny, I'm working on a project for which a lot of the components were coded back in the mid '90s. The state of the art really hasn't advanced since then. The basic API (Xlib/Motif/Xcb) are nominally well documented -- you can find books and the library calls have man pages. Newer libraries and X extensions are a hodge-podge of largely-undocumented and generally incompatible API calls that take more work to integrate than they do to program in (Assuming you can find an example to work from.) The actual frameworks typically require you to drink all their kool-aid in order to use the framework. So I could go GTK+ or QT, learn their idioms and framework implementation details and that's great assuming I never want to change frameworks again and am willing to accept their quirks. And outside of QT, everyone (including motif/xlib) re-invent C++ badly with home-rolled type systems which often involve pushing strings around. Brilliant.
Somehow despite all this it still does what it does better than anything else I've seen. I'm not sure how this is possible, but there you go.
Tax avoidance makes more sense than any other speculation in this discussion.
Were IKEA organized as a normal for-profit venture, then anyone with half a brain at IKEA would see the utility of IkeaHackers and do one of a handful of things:
1. Buy them outright.
2. Obtain favorable advertising terms in exchange for licensing (eg, ikeahackers gets to keep running ads, but 50% of the spots must be filled with IKEA adverts, and sales-active links to the official items mentioned in each article must be included).
3. Think they're cute, and provide gratis branding coaching (including direction on proper use of their logo, precise color usage, etc) in exchange for disclaimers, and big, obvious links back to IKEA.
4. Sign an exclusive advertising deal: ikeahackers.com gets to keep operating, but must only carry IKEA adverts, with some affiliate payment structure for completed sales that originate on ikeahackers.com so that the site can continue to live on.
5. Similar mutually-beneficial arrangements . . .
IKEA have an enthusiastic fan base who, inspired by reading the blog, will likely go out to buy more IKEA product. This is not just a good demographic, but a great big juicy one. These are the people they *want* shopping in their stores, the people they *want* to reach through media campaigns.
So why turn them away? The only conditions that come to mind are when bringing the web site into the fold has larger, more threatening implications to the corporate structure, as the parent post suggests.
Even though there was a bit of a gap between the two schools' programs, 30 years ago you could get an introduction to programming and CS concepts in both of them. It seems like we've been back-sliding since then.
Biology is the only science in which multiplication means the same thing as division.