I'm loving Ed Catmull's book Creativity Inc at the moment, but I do tend to forget he is PhD in Computer Science who invented texture mapping. The articles are really over my head too.
It is worth noting that Catmull attributes their original publish everything attitude (against an industry standard for trade secrets) as formative in acquiring the talent and industry came early on.
And his legal defense case is "the wage fixing was discovered 5 year ago, this case is essentially the same as a different case we lost against other plaintiffs, so we shouldn't be liable to the other victims also"
And one of the interesting things about that is the paper was written in 1978 but the technology was not really used until 20 years later (Geri's Game, 1997) when hardware was finally fast enough to evaluate the algorithm in a reasonable amount of time.
It is worth noting that Catmull attributes their original publish everything attitude (against an industry standard for trade secrets) as formative in acquiring the talent and industry came early on.