It was well-accepted even at big companies like HP, microcomputers that fit on a desk were intended for individual "owners" to get the most out of the electronics by widely sharing programs so each person in that particular hardware ecosystem from the beginning could build on everybody else's work.
"Teams" weren't supposed to be necessary.
At least for the utility type of things that there was the most widespread need for. Nobody dreamed of making an improvent to something like a file manager and not contributing it to a newsletter.
There's no faster way to move ahead when you're talking about technology.
Something truly novel would probably be expected to receive a patent, otherwise code itself was not copyrighted like it can be today. Most people considered code to be the part of the computer that you programmed in yourself, and everybody needed as many sources as possible to learn from or nobody was going to get as far as the electronics were capable of. Everybody was expected to freely run all kinds of things that other people wrote, otherwise how are best practices supposed to arise?
This was before PC's or even Apples, these were industrial HP's not hobbyists using them at home.
These were microprocessor devices, built to be ideally affordable like nothing else, just the opposite of a mainframe which had always been out-of-reach for almost all aspiring programmers.
The idea was for nothing about them to cost money for the user unless there was absolutely no other way. And then it needed to be attractively priced. Nothing else could be considered suitable.
Most of the code to do most anything that most anybody was doing, was supposed to be easily available without actual business transactions. So the only programming you had to do yourself was mainly the specialized stuff for your own unique requirements beyond that. And that was supposed to get easier constantly because everything else was moving forward for every user in unison. The sky was the limit if microprocessors could catch on and everybody get the most they have to offer. After a few decades at the rate it was going? Sheesh.
Like nothing else can compare to, that part was getting easier all the time as everything was building upon the continuous progress everyone with that type hardware was making.
I'll mention that mainframes also had extensive libraries of shared software. The IBM user group SHARE (Society to Help Avoid Redundant Effort) started in 1955 to share software and had hundreds of programs in an IBM-maintained library. IBM also had the Contributed Program Library. Software ranged from math libraries to programming languages to statistics packages to nuclear reactor simulators.
The suggestion that nobody was considering selling for-profit software on microcomputers out of hacker camaraderie seems rather difficult to believe, to put it mildly. CP/M wasn't free either IIRC and pre-dates Gates' BASIC.
[EDIT] Beyond that, if it hadn't been Gates, it would have been Steve Jobs. And if it hadn't been him either, it unquestionably would have been IBM, once they started taking the microcomputer market seriously and released the IBM PC.
You could very well be right on the money, Jobs might have been the one if Gates didn't beat him to it.
I really did exaggerate, it wasn't exactly nobody.
But things like CP/M were completely un-necessary on a proper microcomputer which has the OS in ROM like it's supposed to be.
I liked Jobs because at the time he was carrying on the idea of almost all code free for his hardware as much as possible, just like the other pioneering companies and enthusiasts.
CP/M was a specialty item for a small niche of super-enthusiasts, so they could utilize the additional features it provided right away without having to write code for that themselves. It was worth money to them. Once the PC came out with MS-DOS included, that was the affordable choice for PC's by far. People would have rather not had DOS either if the IBM brand had just included a ROM OS of some kind instead. We wanted disks for storage not for an operating system, that was supposed to be taken for granted.
By that time, CP/M was known for being exorbitantly more expensive than MS-DOS, and ordinary non-corporate users couldn't even come near affording Microsoft offerings as his letter describes.
Everything was going to be just fine once computers got popular enough for there to be enough critical mass among the majority, which were already making more than enough progress sharing without copyright annoyances [0], to overtake companies like Microsoft technically within a few years, except in those niche areas where that kind of thing once belonged.
By providing for user choice of a copyrightable OS, not only at different price points, but price points to being with, IBM set the wheels in motion for there to be far less choice for decades to come.
When you think about it, the way AI is finally capable of putting out some decent code that is so remarkable, is partly because it is effectively bypassing the progress that has been curtailed up until now because of its workaround of copyright alone. Compensating for people not having access to all progress that has been made up until any point in time, over decades, and coming out smelling like a rose more than you would have thought.
If people themselves hadn't had this restriction this whole time, don't you think overall human advancement would have made the amazing AI results seem less surprising and more of an incremental move?
[0] If I said most people were not thinking about it, that's not true. Almost nobody was thinking about it. Almost :)
I'm also sure they would have started thinking about it sooner or later, the ka-ching sound has quite an echo, but it would have been just fine with only patents and no copyright like it had been before.
