Wrt. early social experiments: there clearly was a well-developed code-sharing community by the mid 1960s dealing with scientific computing in Fortran, with tex

Wrt. early social experiments: there clearly was a well-developed code-sharing community by the mid 1960s dealing with scientific computing in Fortran, with textbooks offering incremental refinements of programs to solve problems of shared interest, and there was some portability to such code, within constraints. But I think esr is talking about the emergence of a much more fluent kind of sharing, that needed much deeper portability and automated configuration, and much more direct peer-to-peer sharing of code, of the sort that the emerging connected networks that were to become the internet offered. What you are talking about resembles the early Fortran sharing more than it resembles the Unix-centric sharing. The motivation for the tying you talk of is that it is this kind of code sharing that has really liberated hackers from the grip of proprietary computing. The Fortran and Basic -style of sharing still left hackers with considerable lock-in to the computing environment they were currently using.