> compensate all the people who made possible the compilers, algorithms, programming courses, books, hardware, and so forth that put them in a position to have

> compensate all the people who made possible the compilers, algorithms, programming courses, books, hardware, and so forth that put them in a position to have their brainstorm ... eventually everyone will own parts of our communal knowledge base A bit alarmist, as patents are time-limited (20 years), and much of our software technology is older than that. For example, everything in the Dragon compiler book (1986). Of course, that wasn't true when Abrash wrote the above (1996).