No, Brad Cox thought that the only way reuse could happen at scale would be via micropayments, which of the time he considered to be integral to the software IC idea:
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/brad-cox/
It turns out, of course, that the assumption was faults, and trying to track every dynamic use of software to pay its makers was completely impractical.
What actually happened is similar to what happened with tcp/ip. The phone companies couldn't see how it would be useful, because its lack of per packet accounting meant it couldn't charge for every packet. Instead, by throwing away all the complex accounting systems, TCP/IP could grow far behind what the phone system could do.
My impression is that micropayments were a later evolution of his thinking. When I met Cox in the mid-90s, his talk focused on micropayments as a newer concept.
Stepstone started out by selling bundles of "Software ICs", after all, for a price that was rather "macropayments".
In some sense the idea was just ahead of its time. After all, micropayments are a reality today with the hosted APIs and high-level cloud services that seem to be all the rage these days – services where the primary value-add is in the software that someone’s running for you. It’s not exactly the same concept, but pretty close. Not that I’m a fan of the trend.
It turns out, of course, that the assumption was faults, and trying to track every dynamic use of software to pay its makers was completely impractical.
What actually happened is similar to what happened with tcp/ip. The phone companies couldn't see how it would be useful, because its lack of per packet accounting meant it couldn't charge for every packet. Instead, by throwing away all the complex accounting systems, TCP/IP could grow far behind what the phone system could do.