Page "IBM PC DOS" Paragraph 3

IBM wanted Microsoft to retain ownership of whatever software it developed, and wanted nothing to do with helping Microsoft, other than making suggestions from afar.

According to task force member Jack Sams, " The reasons were internal.

We had a terrible problem being sued by people claiming we had stolen their stuff.

It could be horribly expensive for us to have our programmers look at code that belonged to someone else because they would then come back and say we stole it and made all this money.

We had lost a series of suits on this, and so we didn't want to have a product which was clearly someone else's product worked on by IBM people.

We went to Microsoft on the proposition that we wanted this to be their product.