Microsoft's DOS deal converted a small operating-system acquisition into a reusable licensing asset, helping software economics outrun the hardware economics of the PC itself.
Altair BASIC showed that code could be licensed independently of hardware, giving Microsoft a capital-light model that would eventually become more valuable than the machines it ran on.
Applied Data Research financed Autoflow as a reusable software product when customers expected software to be free, helping prove that proprietary software could support licensing, product R&D, and independent vendors.
The Open Source Initiative gave collaborative source development a new name, a formal definition and a licensing-review process designed to communicate its practical value to businesses and institutions.
Copyleft used copyright law in an unusual way: instead of only restricting copying, it granted broad freedoms while requiring redistributed modified versions to preserve those freedoms.
The BSD licensing tradition allowed source and binary redistribution with minimal conditions, creating a model in which open code could move freely into academic, open-source and proprietary systems alike.