[rerdavies]

Ledbetter actually implicitly reveals why the pilot episode was so off, interestingly.

First off, he wasn't working in the industry at the time the pilot episode takes place. He first got involved in the industry a couple of years later, working for Sun Microsystems. (So not quite the ideal candidate for a technical consultant). And second off, he came to the table after the pilot episode had been written, but before the first regular season script was written. There's only so much a technical consultant can do when he's presented with a script whose central plot point is "it's hard to reverse engineer IBM PCs". He does claim responsibility for the procedure they used to reverse engineer the BIOS, oddly. But I am inclined to be generous, and give him credit for providing the most absurdly difficult technically-plausible procedure for reverse-engineering the BIOS, and grant that the right thing to do (throw the entire script away and start again because it WASN'T difficult to reverse-engineer the BIOS) was not a pragmatic realistic recommendation for a rookie technical consultant to deliver.

To put things in perspective. There was no need to reverse engineer the BIOS at all, because the IBM Technical Manual provided exquisitely commented assembler source code for the BIOS (copyright protected), including API documentation (the essence of which is not copyright protected). And a complete set of schematics. And IBM was -- for complicated reasons -- actively encouraging third parties to build clones. So correcting the technical inaccuracies in a pilot script whose entire plot revolves around "how audaciously difficult it is to reverse an IBM PC" is a bit interesting.

Once corrected, the plot of the pilot episode would have revolved around clean-room procedures for translating API documentation into copyright-safe BIOSes. Probably not that interesting to the unwashed masses. And abstract speculation as to whether IBM would sue their pants off for IP violations, even though IBM was very publicly and loudly saying that they would not. And whether you could convince CFOs and investors that they could take IBM at their word.

The actual strategy IBM was using was pretty clever, and quite horrifyingly machiavellian (although fair and reasonable enough that nobody ever really complained about it). I'm not actually sure if I'm allowed to tell the story of what happened when IBM patent attorneys showed up at our door wanting to have a discussion about a 10" thick stack of patents. Suffice it to say that I think they were playing a long game.

[walterbell]

IBM would later work with Apache Foundation for patent-aware open source. They also helped to legitimize Linux for corporate use.