We'd have to look up to see who wrote that Wiki entry, because in fact there has never been any indication (or claim by Jobs, for that matter) that Xerox licensed anything to Apple in exchange for the stock option. Every single personal history, from PARC or Apple, agrees that Xerox simply agreed to give a demo.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
The depiction I've related, though admittedly anecdotal, is a distillation of what I've been directly told by folks (plural) who were there. But it's still hearsay, and I share your frustration that the concrete documentation is long faded.
Even the very next sentence in that Wikipedia reference talks about Xerox later suing Apple. If Apple was licensed to use Xerox IP, then Xerox would not have filed a lawsuit claiming that Apple had stolen copyrighted ideas from PARC.
For all practical purposes, they didn't. A new Xerox CEO who had not been involved insisted on the suit; both it and he did not last long. What is known is that the lawsuit ended abruptly after the judge was presented documents by Apple, and there are persistent reports/allegations that the statute of limitations had expired as well, though it's hard to imagine Xerox's lawyers being so lame as to overlook something that fundamental.
In comparison to the amount of money that Apple (and others) would make off GUIs, a few million dollars was tiny.
LOL. No one held a gun to their head and forced them to sell at the two-year mark. It's intriguing to conjecture what Xerox's world would be like if they'd held the shares to this day. ...Another squandered opportunity for Xerox, among a gazillion squandered opportunities.
We might was well ask why the Apple Lisa wasn't a success.
Actually, that is a very good comment. My read: they both failed for lack of sufficient innovation on the manufacturing-cost and marketing side. The Mac was Apple's next attempt at successfully concluding the task that Apple had set for itself: to bring GUI technology to everyday users. Lisa was too costly for that.
It's pretty well established that the main reason for the second visit was not just to get more info, but mostly to convince the software illiterate Jobs that the Mac team should be allowed to continue work on a GUI of some sort.
We should all be so software illiterate. Jobs' work at NeXT suggests he learned the lessons of object-oriented programming he was exposed to in those two meetings. Not well enough to drive the Mac in that direction, perhaps (until Steve rev. 2 and the NeXTSTEP-based OS X), but learn it he did.
But here's my problem. Your phrasing ("the software illiterate Jobs") reflects a certain simmering hatred that's unbecoming. No entrepreneur in recent memory has accomplished what Steve Jobs has. Most history-making entrepreneurs satisfy themselves with revolutionizing or creating one market or industry. Ford and Whitney are examples. Edison, like Jobs, revolutionized or created several industries: motion pictures, electric lighting, generation, the phonograph... Jobs did it with personal computers (Apple II), did it again with personal computers (Mac), did it
again with personal computers (iPad), did it with smartphones (iPhone), did it with animated feature films (Pixar), did it with personal media (iPod)... and the guy's only in his mid-fifties. In each case, like Edison, his accomplishment was not of the mad-scientist-with-light-bulb-over-his-head variety but the result of steady-handed construction of cross-functional teams driven by vision and customer-centricity.
It sends some folks into frothing paroxysms of pique, but the fact is that Jobs is
sui generis, the world's most talented and accomplished serial business builder, and neither you nor I are fit to carry his pencil-case. You don't have to like him as a human being (fondness for Woz-the-human, by comparison, is mandatory), but as a businessman the guy's a freakin' divide-by-zero singularity.
