And Apple stole a UI from Xerox Parc. Open AI stole everyone's content.

This is how the industry innovates

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They were not dim, but Microsoft copied a lot, and didn't innovate. This aspect of Microsoft hasn't changed.

In the 1990s, during the competition between Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, Sun's CEO, Scott McNealy, compared Bill Gates to Ginger Rogers. This analogy suggested that, like Rogers, who danced everything Fred Astaire did but backward and in high heels, Gates was adept at following and adapting competitors' innovations. This comparison was part of Sun's broader critique of Microsoft's business practices at the time.

"It has been noted that everything Astaire did, Rogers was able to do -- backwards and in high heels. That's high praise for the nimble Ms. Rogers. But for a would-be visionary, following someone else's lead -- no matter how skillfully -- simply doesn't cut it."

https://web.archive.org/web/19991013082222/www.sun.com/dot-c...

I think it comes from a misread of the text in the gates interview linked in the comment:

"r. We were moving ahead very rapidly: BASIC, FORTRAN, LISP, PDP-10 machine language, digging out the operating system listings from the trash and studying those. Really not just banging away to find bugs like monkeys[laughs], but actually studying the code to see what was wrong."

My understanding is that they saw the source implementation for other BASICs (on mainframes or whatever they were called at the time) but their code is mostly their own. Few if any programmers spring fully-formed from the head of zeus (although paul allen was close) and plenty of valuable intellectual property was originally created elsewhere.

"Just porting" is doing some seriously heavy lifting, if it's referring to porting something from a mainframe to one of the micros of the day.

One minor thing to consider is that hobbyists weren't distributing the source code (as posted in the OP) but trading the paper tape of the executable interpreter. They wanted the interpreter so they could write their own software that was probably unrelated to basic itself, that was just a means to an end.

The industry pretty quickly moved to incorporate basic in rom on many platforms and microsoft was able to capitalize on that integration through licensing. I don't think his letter did much other than antagonize hobbyists - but they made a lot licensing to the hardware manufacturers later on (and the hardware was truly more valuable with basic on board.

(One of my all time to this day favorite computers from that era is the TRS-80 Model 100. I don't remember if Microsoft provided the entire software stack for it, but I believe it was the last product that Bill Gates actually contributed to the software development.)

And he won that argument. The steady movement away from Free Software licenses to shared source is because developers want to get paid by people using the code they created just as Gates describes in the letter. Even Bruce Perens is trying to hammer out a Post-Open Source license that's proprietary in all but name.