CERN Celebrates 30th Anniversary of the World Wide Web

upstart writes:

Software vendors and the EU weren't interested, so giving it away became the best option:

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) on Sunday celebrated the 30th anniversary of releasing the World Wide Web into the public domain.

As the World Wide Web Consortium's brief history of the web explains, in 1989 Tim Berners-Lee - then a fellow at CERN - proposed that the organization adopt "a global hypertext system." His first name for the project was "Mesh".

And as the Consortium records, in 1990 Berners-Lee set to work on "a hypertext GUI browser+editor using the NeXTStep development environment. He makes up 'WorldWideWeb' as a name for the program."

Berners-Lee's work gathered a very appreciative audience inside CERN, and soon started to attract attention elsewhere. By January 1993, the world had around 50 HTTP servers. The following month, the first graphical browser - Marc Andreessen's Mosaic - appeared.

Alternative hypertext tools, like Gopher, started to lose their luster.

On April 30, 1993, CERN signed off on a decision that the World Wide Web - a client, server, and library of code created under its roof - belonged to humanity (the letter was duly stamped on May 3).

"CERN relinquishes all intellectual property rights to this code, both source and binary form, and permission is granted for anyone to use, duplicate, modify and redistribute it" states a letter signed on that day by Walter Hoogland and Helmut Weber - at the time respectively CERN's director of research and director of administration.

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