Beware Non-Evil Companies

The open source company Ringside had an interesting idea:

Ringside enables any website to be a container for OpenSocial applications.

Alas, that idea doesn't look like it is going much further, and for a rather interesting reason:

We were ready for our Series A round of funding, and in late May we received a number of term sheet offers from the very best VC firms. As we were about to finalize our funding, one of the biggest non-evil Internet companies asked if we would have interest in being acquired instead. After a lot of thought and debate, we decided that the larger company would enable us to get our technology to market sooner and with more impact.

The story sounds almost too good to be true. And it was. After dragging out the process for most of the summer, the non-evil company decided that they really did not want to acquire the company after all. Recommendation: always beware of wolves dressed as Grandma, they may be more like Microsoft than they admit.

I wonder who they could be talking about...? (Via ecmarchitect.)