Armchair expert articles like these make conclusion first and justify it later. Google has obviously given a LOT back to community. They had all the reasons to keep BigTable or MapReduce or GWT as trade secrets. On the other hand, Bell labs never intended all research to go to public domain. In reality lot of things "escaped" to public domain because they apparently did not saw any competitive benefit in them. Also saying that only Google is doing this is also purely false. FaceBook and Twitter has given back to community a lot. Similarly Microsoft Research has published probably more research (many times including the one that offered competitive advantage) than very likely any other company on the planet: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/science/publicati....