[grey-area]

Dropbox, Facebook, Twitter and all of the other successful companies would have succeeded despite all of this shit.

None of those successful companies make a profit; they are all in the process of burning through someone else's money. Whether they can convert that to a money-making situation is still an open question, but given their huge valuations, that might be tough. They have certainly been a success for their founders, initial investors, and free users, but as companies (which are formed to make a profit), they are not currently successful.

If you are so hostile to big money, then you should not be promoting companies as successes which have relied heavily on raising huge amounts of money to fund loss-making operations for years. Other companies like linode, slicehost or 37signals might be better examples of success you could aspire to.

[declan]

That's not true. Facebook is making a profit:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24751441 "The increase in revenue led to $425m in net profit in the three months to September."

[grey-area]

Thanks for the correction, I'd missed that FB recently turned a profit.

If you consider all the investment in them, including the IPO, of course they are nowhere near profit on that, so now their problem is turning that $425m profit into something that justifies their valuation of $100 billion and pays back all their investors; that might take quite some time, however over a long enough time frame (if they last that long), they could pull it off.