The Internet knows many birthdays, April 30th is another one: 30 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau received a written confirmation from one of the directors of the Geneva nuclear research center CERN. According to her, it is now legal for anyone to use the web protocol and program a web server or a web browser and give away or sell the software. CERN does not charge any license fees or impose any other conditions on distribution. The confirmation paved the way for the triumph of the World Wide Web. It is something like a declaration of independence against all attempts to squeeze the WWW into commercial exploitation runs.
If you want to understand the meaning of the license anniversary, you have to delve a little deeper into the development history of the 1990s. Starting in 1991, Tim Berners-Lee tried to get his idea of a web server and a web browser as components for an information retrieval system out to the public. So he demonstrated his idea with a Website attendees at the HyperText’91 conference held in San Antonio, Texas in December. His submitted paper was rejected by the conference organizers, but that didn’t stop Berners-Lee from using the system on his friend’s NeXT Paul Jones to demonstrate, who taught library science at the University of North Carolina. Throughout 1992, Berners-Lee and his project leader, Robert Cailliau, saw ideas tumbling down on the www-talk mailing list. With Erwise and ViolaWWW there were the first browsers for X Window, a browser called Samba for the Mac was announced.
In March 1993, Tim Berners-Lee flew back to the United States to Fermilab to demonstrate his system in Chicago. In town he met Tom Bruce, who was developing a browser called Cello for Microsoft Windows, and heard about a browser development on National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Illinois. With friends, he set off across the prairie from Chicago, only to find that development had taken a very different path. At the NCSA, they didn’t say something could be found on the web, they talked about something being “on Mosaic.” At the same time, Marc Andreessen, one of the project managers, discussed what the licensing conditions could look like. A first report immediately appeared in the New York Times, which portrayed Mosaic and the programmers without once mentioning the web.
The Gopher Disaster
At that time, the Web, its servers, and its browsers were still marginal phenomena that interested hypertext geeks and programmers of information retrieval systems. An early forerunner of the search engine called Gopher, which had been developed at the University of Minnesota, attracted much more attention at the time. The “pocket rat” was an information system accessed through clients available for X Window, the Mac, DOS, and Unix.
In his widely circulated standard work, Whole Internet Users Guide & Catalog, Ed Krol praised Gopher as a retrieval system for everyone. However, he criticized that the directory structures and classifications were not maintained by trained librarians, so each Gopher instance was structured slightly differently. He simply recommended his readers to experiment with gopher: “Nobody watches and laughs at your mistakes. Then just make them!”
Tim Berners-Lee was bothered by something completely different at the time. In the spring of 1993, the University of Montana began changing the license terms. While the clients could be used free of charge, companies should pay heavily for Gopher servers. Even universities had to shell out an annual fee. Also, the Gopher protocol was licensed under the condition that it was the property of the university. The result: the IT industry dropped Gopher like a hot potato, Berners-Lee wrote of a Gopher disaster.
information system of unprecedented proportions
Much to his relief, this couldn’t happen to the web. After his return from the USA, mail fluttered into the house. In his book “Weaving the Web” Berners-Lee recalled the big moment of 1993: “On April 30 Robert and I received a declaration, with a CERN stamp, signed by one of the directors, saying that CERN agreed to allow anybody to use the web protocol and code free of charge, to create a server or a browser, to give it away or sell it, without any royalty or other constraint. Whew!” (“On April 30, Robert and I received a statement signed by one of the directors with a CERN stamp, stating that CERN agreed to allow anyone to use the web protocol and code for free, a server or a browser create it, give it away or sell it without any royalties or other restrictions. Oof!”)
Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, doesn’t take good care of Web 3.0 developments.
(Image: dpa, Sven Braun/dpa)
With the confirmation by the management, it was ensured that the World Wide Web could continue to develop after the Big Bang. How viable the system was became clear at the latest when the browser war between Netscape and Microsoft heated up tempers. The Web continued to grow despite the millions that Microsoft and Netscape sunk in pitched battle to conquer the “market”. From the judgment of Berners-Lee and Cailliau’s superiors, who commented on all of the two’s proposals as vague but exciting, an information system of unprecedented proportions eventually grew, with companies such as Google and Amazon. Without the web protocol, they wouldn’t even exist.
In the tradition of this form of Freedom in designing programs, as it was once formulated by Richard Stallman, is the future that Berners-Lee is pursuing with the World Wide Web Consortium as a non-profit organization. Sir Berners-Lee, who has since been ennobled, could reveal what else he is up to at the WeAreDevelopers congress. Or not. As is well known, Berners-Lee recently spoke out against Web 3.0 and its rip-off offers with blockchains and cryptocurrencies.
(ssi)
