[kragen]

Right, and it turns out that they were sharing a sophisticated base system; it was just that the licensing, once people started applying copyright to software at all, didn't protect the users very well.

And, yes, clearly information sharing is very good for software — as I pointed out elsewhere in this thread, that’s what SHARE was founded for in 1955 — but it’s also good for chemistry, and yet it took many centuries before we got Priestley and the Invisible College instead of alchemists writing notes in code so their apprentices couldn’t steal them.