[T]oday many technology historians point out that Xerox did not do very much to protect the intellectual property they created.I wonder if we'd have a world run by GUIs now if Xerox had "protected" their "intellectual property".
On I wrote Protecting intellectual property, on the subject of Rants and Software.
Jensen Harris, on the MS Office 12 weblog, talks about the "why" of the new Office UI, and in a section harking back to Xerox PARC inventing the graphical interface, includes this great line:
lol. If there was one company that helped copying, you'd think it would be Xerox