Exactly twenty years ago, a document was published that played a huge role in establishing the web as we know it today. Twenty years later, and this simple and straightforward document is proof of an irrefutable fact: while closed technologies can change markets, open technologies can change the world.
I personally believe the web is one of the most important inventions in the history of mankind. It’s right up there with the printing press and radio/TV, but just one notch below things like fire and agriculture. It’s only a few decades old, but has already had a huge effect on the world and mankind that inhabits it. Not all the web has brought is positive, but then, is there something out there that has done so?
Few people know, but the reason the web has been as successful as it has been is because CERN released its foundations into the public domain. The twenty year old document in which they announced this is, therefore, one of the most important documents in computing.
The following CERN software is hereby put into the public domain:
- W 3 basic (“line mode”) client
- W 3 basic server
- W 3 library of common code.
CERN’s intention is to further compatibility, common practices and standards in networking and computer supported collaboration. This does not constitute a precedent to be applied to any other CERN copyright software.
CERN relinquishes all intellectual property to this code, both source and binary form and permission is granted for anyone to use, duplicate, modify and redistribute it.
No patents, no copyright, no royalties, nothing. CERN’s James Gillies is clear: “Without it you would have had web-like things but they would have belonged to Microsoft or Apple or Vodafone or whoever else. You would not have a single open standard for everyone.” He’s right.
Without CERN removing all artificially constructed legal barriers, we wouldn’t be where we are today. Commercial entities like Microsoft and Apple want to lock you into their products – had they designed the web, you’d have to pay through the nose for patents, they would have actively blocked and killed competitors trying to use their version of the web, and they would have made a dreary place with little to no innovation.
This week, the document turned twenty. A document which, perhaps more than any other, proves that while closed technologies can change markets, open technologies can change the world.
Well worth the taxpayers’ money.
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One can wonder about that “while closed technologies can change markets, open technologies can change the world. […] the web is one of the most important inventions in the history of mankind. It’s right up there with the printing press and radio/TV” – wasn’t TV field heavily patented? OTOH, maybe it took off only when the patents largely expired…
Skype might be borderline, too – I think in its short few years it changed a bit more than just markets, when enacting its great shift in long distance communication.
Actually… funny story about that. I am actually related to Philo Farnsworth (I think he’s my grandmother’s uncle or something) at one point in time I’d asked why the whole family wasn’t rich if he’d invented the television.
Turns out that while he had invented the core ideas behind it, long story short, he naively hadn’t patented it so several companies kind of jumped on the gun him and… well the rest is history.
Patents, unfortunately, always screw over the actual inventor and end up only making bank for the companies that swindle the inventors.
When I see patent dispute over H264 vs. VP8, Java/Flash messing all around, not everything is free (beer) and free (speech) over there tough.
Considering that something around 99% is prOn, the remaining 1% made a really wonderful job enlightening mankind. What would have it been it it was 5% or even 10% ?
Beware of censorship for “moral” reasons in “democracy”, it’s then all too easy to ban surrounding subjects as a whole due to “technical inability to just filter the targeted content”.
Web should remain neutral, whatever happens. It’s up to citizens to teach the right and the wrong instead to make it disappears from eyesight and feels good.
Kochise
There is still hope for a free web (browser and platform agnostic) with video and without plugins:
http://www.infoworld.com/d/application-development/mozilla-otoy-tea…
http://www.techhive.com/article/2037581/mozilla-otoy-team-on-javasc…
http://phys.org/news/2013-05-video-plug-ins-mozilla-otoy-codec-tide…
Edited 2013-05-07 10:46 UTC
Considering the current (un)support of WebGL, which is basically an OpenGL 1.2 derivative, on OpenGL 4.3 capable machines, it’s just flabbergasting. Even Opera who made a big buzz abou their early support of WebGL only introduced it in their stable release in version 12, and it’s still far from complete (support only very basic WebGL web sites, 90% don’t work at all)
Then comes the native H264/WebM support, etc… MNG was supposed to replace animated GIF, how much MNG-compliant browsers out there ?
SVG is a mess, support is scarce as well, Opera mostly hangs on that (yeah, I use Opera but I’m thinking more and more to switch) etc…
Kochise
It was called the Microsoft Network, it was coded with a proprietary content authoring system based on Visual Basic called Blackbird, and it required Windows 95.
Happily, CERN’s little open text-based network protocol stomped it so badly that it lasted all of 6 months. The Microsoft Network 2 became a website and ISP, Blackbird became a web authoring system called Interdev with the horribly proprietary (and notably insecure) ActiveX, and the Windows 95 client became Internet Explorer.
Read more on Wikipedia, Blackbird (online platform).
I for some reason believed that the www was created in the U.S. I’m happy to learn from this that it’s not the case.
You’re most likely thinking of TCP/IP itself.
The basic plumbing of it evolves out of ARPANET which was crated by the US Department of Defense. So from a certain point of view you can say the internet was a US creation. There were lots of different technologies on the internet in the late 80’s. But the www has become the dominant way to use the internet and it is what people would consider the modern internet to be. The www owes a lot to Cern and a British man who created hypertext.
Not sure what can claim to be the ‘first’ internet ever, but in addition to ARPNET there was the PLATO computer system developed at the University of Illinois.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_%28computer_system%29
PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations) was the first (ca. 1960, on ILLIAC I) generalized computer assisted instruction system, and, by the late 1970s, comprised several thousand terminals worldwide on nearly a dozen different networked mainframe computers.
Another early influence: the French CYCLADES network
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CYCLADES
“It was developed to explore alternatives to the ARPANET design and to support network research generally. It was extremely influential on the Internet’s initial design.”
If we’re going to be anal about it, that British man did not “invent” hypertext.
Hypertext, and the concepts for it, predates the internet.
Innovation != invention
Put it this way, a British man took Hypertext and made it in to a useful TCP/IP based client/server application. CERN then donated it free to the world. This is no different to any other innovation that built on the basic invention of another person or organisation. But let’s not belittle the achievement. Because without his little innovation, we wouldn’t be here arguing the toss over the definition of said achievement, now, would we?
Well…BitTorrent actually accounts for more traffic, from at least one report I read. Could have been off, but when you consider a web page might be a couple of megs at worst versus a several gigs torrent download of your favorite free OS …
You really think “your favorite free OS” represents a significant part of traffic on bittorent? Better check out http://btdigg.org/top100.html (which monitors DHT network); free OS don’t even seem to register in top100.
Edited 2013-05-07 19:12 UTC
As i still remember the first BBS servers, having to keep flip books full of IP address numbers to get anywhere, the horrible screeching of my modem as it dialed…man that was so long ago.
/jumps up on soapbox/…Kids today don’t know how well they have it today! You think FB is bad? Bah we had Geocities and the cursed Comet Cursor constantly trying to infect your systems with dreck, our spyware included a big talking purple monkey that wouldn’t STFU and who told endless jokes made of puns, if you were lucky you MIGHT get that PC unboxed and hooked up before systems twice as fast were on the shelves, and do you have ANY idea how long it took to install an OS with floppies? and it never failed there was ALWAYS one bad floppy, usually the next to last one, so you had better be used to waiting 6-8 weeks for the company to send you another one.
Spoiled rotten kids with their Hulu and free HD porn, all we had was GIFs and a single grainy 15 second GIF could take an hour to download! Fancy flash animation bah, we had the blink tag and we liked it! You get to choose from dozens of sprawling MMOs for free, we all had to use download managers because it would take 5 days if you were lucky to download a single DOOM level and that was all we had!
So you go back to tweeting your twits and your FB hits, you kids wouldn’t know the real net if Gopher came up and bit you on the butt!
Stop complaining. I started out using a teletype terminal on a HP-3000 minicomputer.
Edited 2013-05-03 06:54 UTC
DING!
KERCHUNK!
</joking>I still count on my fingers and talk to people, like, directly</joking>
I agree 100% with everything you said except for this. I might rephrase it to “we had the blink tag and we used it!” but I’m pretty sure the backlash against the blink tag started about 15 minutes after its release.
Actually I do have to make one small point on this one. We did have our choice of countless MMO’s that actually required no download time at all.
They were just text based and called MUDs(MUSH,MUCK, MOO… etc). Ah yes… good old fashioned MUDs.
Did anyone else shell out the $10 a month for Gemstone back in the day? LoL.
As for the OP, huge props to CERN for their massive contribution to the internet as we know it today, in a time where open sourcing things wasn’t hip or trendy. I didn’t even know about CERN’s involvement until this article, and I’ve spent many hours over the course the last 15 years reading up on computer history.
Thank you OSAlert for bringing this gem to all our attention.
10 years is a lifetime, apparently, in internet time…
you forgot, MUDs were the first MMOs. Just text based and by today’s standards not very massive.
Besides MSN, I recall CompuServ, and of course AOL (well, don’t remember it as such, wrong continent, but was aware of it). Only after ’95 the web took off (at least in the Netherlands, afair), and crushed everything else.
I do wonder what the future of the web holds though, with all these tablet and phone apps taylored to a specific website.
In a lot of cases it is a web site designed to facilitate an app, e.g. the app isn’t tailored to the web site, but rather a web site is tailored to an app. At least for anything that deals with volumes of dynamic content.
…private companies are trying to lock it with DRM.
Life is such vicious circle…
Because, you know it, DMR emphasis “with protection of consumers’ benefit from innovation”. Something like that, I guess, or the exact opposite, I don’t know, I’m puzzled…
Kochise
In the great push toward WWW and all that it entailed, we lost Usenet! Well at least Usenet that was provided as part of your ISP package.
When I first got online (not counting BBSs, since they were generally not ‘the Internet’) back in 1993, there was IRC, FTP, Usenet, Gopher, Email, etc. Most people these days don’t know what the hell any of those are except Email, and even then I hear a ton of people thinking that Twitter is better…
At least CERN had WWW opened though, like the other technologies on the Internet. It also opened it up to so many other types of users.
The web isn’t the internet, the internet made the web possible, and there likely would have been alternatives to the web had it not been developed.
Hyperlinking had been around in a couple of different forms.
We already had ftp, gopher, nntp, and more.
I don’t think the web is anywhere nearly as important as the Internet.
web, as we have it today, is WORST CASE SCENARIO of global network!
Today’s WWW is merely 10% of original idea.
even Tim Berners-Lee realised where he made mistake and he did try to fix things at many occasion but he failed. e.g. http://www.upriss.org.uk/papers/isko02.pdf
We are stuck in absolute chaos of endless and questionable information! Beside, we have problems with copyrights…
only bright light in this chaos is Google whit his enormous power of sorting, checking, bounding, linking… some of this Google power we can see through: “google knowledge graph”; – Tim B. Lee’s WEB took this power from us, common people, because he made WEB a utterly dumb, dumb version of original Ted Nelsons idea.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9PmIkAYhI0 (you will need quite extend and broad knowledge from history, lot of patience and reading, to understand what went wrong with todays web, and technology general)
Edited 2013-05-06 12:54 UTC
Dumb works.