If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders. - Hal Abelson

Giving it away helps defuse complex intellectual property issues of ownership and control that can distract the universities from their missions to disseminate knowledge." - commmenting on MIT's Open Courseware program

See, in general, as systems designers, you’re forced with necessity to make decisions about how you’re going to do things, and in general, the way you’d like to retain flexibility is to never make up your mind about anything until you’re forced to do it. The problem is, there’s a very, very narrow line between deferring decisions and outright procrastination. So you’d like to make progress, but also at the same time, never be bound by the consequences of your decisions.

In the Middle Ages people built cathedrals, where the whole town would get together and make a thing that's greater than any individual person could do and the society would kind of revel in that. We don't do that as much anymore, but in a sense this is kind of like building a cathedral.