most of those ideas were graduate student projects at Stanford working part-time at PARC who funded their ideas. The fact they were a pure research for research sake shouldn't negate the fact Apple gave PARC stock valued > $100 million but PARC sold it early.But PARC was an open door store and MANY ideas they came up with were 'stolen' to create billion dollar companies. 3Com is one. There are many others.
I did get to see the 'first ever laser printer'. It was GIGANTIC!! Like almost three huge chest type freezers set end to end, and a bit wider/taller. And how many years until we had the Apple Laserwriter?
If Xerox wanted to sue every company that 'stole' their tech innovations, they would level the industry as we know it. PARC was basic research for research sake. If government actually funded basic research, there could be massive leaps and bounds due to that program. Research often isn't profitable, so it's almost literally pouring money down a hole, but when it hits, it often hits big.
And Star was a GIU, and Apple/steve had no access to the source code, but did see the operation. They programmed their Finder to be similar to Star, but different enough to avoid lawsuits anyway.
The board at Xerox had no idea what they were creating funding all those said projects, but 3Com, BayNetworks, SUN Microsystems, etc., got their ideas tested w/o having a need for Venture Capitalism as it didn't exist then.
Steve was fond of mentioning not getting Smalltalk while being mesmerized by the Mouse and GUIs that Apple took to a whole new level.