First and foremost it wasn't mined for free. At the time they invested in opening several instances of steemd in AWS. No one else cared to do the same and they were very open about their intention to acquire a majority stake.

The point of my comment is that alot of people keep blaming steemit for not doing stuff that they think they should have done. We should not expect them to do everything that we want them to do. Steem is an open protocol and nobody needs to ask permission to build on top of it nor blame them for using their stake in a way that they see fit.

This does not mean that I agree with the way that they have handled the development of the blockchain (which is their main focus).

Frankly, the blame steemit inc argument is getting old, especially since you chose an area of discussion (twitter tipping) where someone else already did the work over a year ago.