The slippery slope of "intellectual property" is so steep that even building interface-compatible products is now considered ripping something off. We've come a long way from the age of IBM compatibles and the PC revolution.
On the other hand you could argue that while the pc revolution fueled on DOS licensing and IBM compatible BIOS was a a massive leap for the economy overall, it wasnt the best move for IBM in either the short nor the long term. Now they do the no-scales business of services and consulting...
IBM made several pretty serious mistakes that lead to Microsoft's dominance on software licensing. But even on the hardware side they could have seen huge success but instead wasted time and mindshare creating the failed Microchannel architecture in order to regain control over the PC platform.
to clarify: I meant economies of scale. In services they are much much lover then in software licensing (example: microsoft in the 80ties and 90ies) or integrated products (example: apple now)
