Hello fellow ex-IBMer. I came to the corp from an open source background and I was happy that my LTC coworkers seemed to despise software parents despite the huge pressure from management.
I wonder how much of this is that IBM fell out of the patent lead and decided to just take their ball and go home. Or how much is RedHat influence shifting the mindset away from the patent Mexican standoff with everyone else.
I read "The Idea Factory" about Bell Labs, focused mostly on inventing the transistor, but it included their consolidation into this lab and just how state of the art it was. The book implied that it was the first corporate "campus" designed more like a university than a factory or office.
The book really made me understand that AT&T / Bell Labs was the hot tech firm of the early 20th century, long before getting to computing advances (C, UNIX) I was more familiar with.