This happens a lot in companies who specialize in SCO. They pay their employees to meet a "quota" of postings on website placing links on web pages relevant to a search query so that thus the google results are boosted. The CEO of the company once told me that there is such a thing in his mind as a "smart and legal spam."

In my time at companies like IBM and Intel they make heavy use of commercial spice and pspice. So students learning to simulate on those software kits will feel like they are learning something they can use in thier working life. Also IBM and intel have internal extensions to the open source versions which I obviosly can't discuss in detail but they exist and students who want to possibly extend those programs can do so and be company supported.

I use the word donate not to imply that Microsoft gave it out of the kindness of their heart, but that they just merely gave it to the community. Yes, I'll admit the reasoning behind it may have a bit of duplicity behind it, but as it's been said "Everyone contributes code to an open source project to scratch their own itch" and even though Microsoft got caught doing something stupid and sloppy they are still scratching their own itch and you have some nice virtualization driver code now to play with (or learn from) at the cost of said idiocy, but also with the scratching of their itch. I think it's condescending for you to assume my use of donate dresses up Microsoft as skipping over the rainbow on a unicorn to deliver a wonderful gift to the open source community because it's not. Just because you think I mean it one way doesn't mean it's actually suppose to be taken that way. Alas, the beauty of natural language lies in it's ability to have the same words mean 2 different things and it's clear to me you've seemed to miss the point.

Truthfully, I enjoy bashing Microsoft as much as the next person, but is it so bad that I think we should move on from this whole GPL violation and look to the submission that Microsoft made to the linux kernel? I mean com'on, they acted accordingly to their violation and donated the code to the community, who cares why they did it. Can we please move on as a culture?