Internet foi liberada hai 15 anos

Así o dicía onte BBC News no artigo “The World Wide Web turns 15 (again)”:

[...] perhaps the most important Web anniversary of all is 30 April 1993. That’s the day that CERN put the web in the public domain, thereby ensuring that the world would have a single system for accessing the Internet, instead of a Microsoft Web, a Macintosh Web and who knows, perhaps even an Amstrad Web.

Today, it is hard to imagine a world without the web, yet well into the 1990s, internet access was the reserve of the privileged few, mainly academics. Although the internet had been around since the 1970s, accessing documents on remote computers required the mastery of complex protocols. [...]

To most at CERN, complex protocols were just fine, but to Berners-Lee, there was clearly a need to manage better the digital information available in various databases and distributed across a plethora of computers at CERN and its collaborating universities and research centres around the globe. [...]

Systems with names like Archie, WAIS and Gopher sprang up and briefly shone before being eclipsed by the World Wide Web. Of these, Gopher was the most successful, with Gopher conferences attracting hundreds of delegates.

Gopher was the product of IT professionals at the University of Minnesota, an institution that took a very business-like approach to the development.

In spring 1993, the University started charging for Gopher servers while still distributing the browsers for free. That’s a successful business model today, but the world wasn’t ready for it in 1993. The day that Gopher stopped being free is the day that the web started to take over. In 1994, Gopher grew at the seemingly healthy rate of 997%, but the same year, the Web grew by 341634%.

The difference was a simple piece of paper that CERN issued on 30 April 1993, putting the Web in the public domain. Simply stated, that meant that CERN renounced intellectual property rights to the web, but that no one else could claim them either.

The following year, Berners-Lee moved to Boston to take up the role of Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, set up by MIT as a global standards body for the web.

W3C, as the consortium is known, has the job of ensuring that whatever computer, whatever server and whatever browser you choose to use, the web will still look the same.

CERN’s apparent altruism is deeply embedded in the organization’s culture. Founded in 1954 by 12 European countries, CERN exists to carry out fundamental, curiosity-driven, research. [...]