@sicp >I don't think trade secret laws covered software before that point, either
Companies try to claim that everything is a trade secret, but I haven't seen any cases where software source code was deemed to not be a trade secret.

I agree that patents and trade secret laws should be abolished, as they result in only a steep negative.

>with their products suddenly found it in their interest to stop (ex. when Xerox refused to give the AI Lab the driver code for their new printer).
It wasn't only Xerox who refused - one of Xerox's developers signed an NDA to betray humanity and then carried through on the betrayal.

>The source to the original Quake was released under GPLv2 in 1999, 3 years after the game came out.
I was thinking of DOOM, which took 10-20 years for the different versions.

>IIRC it was one of the first commercial games to be ported to GNU/Linux.
A commercial proprietary game being ported was arguably less interesting than all the interesting free software games ported to GNU/Linux prior.