Quinn Norton took some notes at the closing keynote for the O'Reilly Open Source convention in Portland, in which George Dyson discussed his research into Von Neumann's papers dating from the birth of computer science:
von neumann invented modern computer under the set of wild conditions detailed in the log books of the people working with the computer. i can't do it justice, so i won't really try to hit on it too much here, i just hope someone can annotate with his talk slides.
with the navy and rca battling over who would have patent rights, von neumann settled things by publishing without patents- this is where dyson sees it tying into the oss movement: "keep it an open universe, cause that's how it started"
