The European Organization for Nuclear Research, better known as CERNcelebrated last Sunday the 30th anniversary of the release of the World Wide Web (WWW) into the public domainan event that was the definitive starting signal for the medium with which we interact with the Internet.
The paternity of the World Wide Web is attributed to the British scientist Tim Berners-Lee, who began to propose in 1989 a general information management model around the experiments that were (and are) carried out at CERN. The initial intention was to create a management system that would allow scientists and institutions around the world working with CERN data to share information accurately and quickly. In other words, the initial purpose was much more humble and Tim Berners-Lee was not aware that he was changing the world forever.
The work started by Tim Berners-Lee managed to capture a lot of interest within CERN, so attention began to be paid from other places. The structure around the web had around 50 HTTP servers in January 1993 and Mosaic, the first web browser, was released on the same date. CERN made the decision on April 30, 1993 to release the World Wide Web into the public domain.with a structure that was made up of a server part, another that acts as a client, and a code library.
Because the standards around copyright licenses were still in their early stages of development, the European Organization for Nuclear Research published the following via a document when making the World Wide Web available to the public: “ CERN disclaims all intellectual property rights to this code, both in source and binary form, and permission is granted for anyone to use, duplicate, modify, and redistribute it.”
Tim Berners-Lee.
As the concept and model of open source took shape during the course of the 1990s, the next version of the software was released in 1994 under an open source license instead of public domain. The consequence of that movement is that CERN retained copyright, but allowed anyone to freely use and modify the web.
Despite the twist in 1994, Walter Hoogland, one of the co-signers of the document that proclaimed the liberation of the web, has not hesitated to affirm that “Most people would agree that the public launch was the best thing we could have done and that it was the source of the success of the World Wide Web.”. Basically, the release as a public domain in 1993 was the real starting signal for the web to have its current form, which has translated not only into an improvement in the transmission of information within CERN, but also into a benefit for society in general.
On October 1, 1994, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was born., which is basically the institution that defines the standards of the web and was founded by Tim Berners-Lee, who continues to run it today. The English scientist founded the W3C under the umbrella of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), just after leaving his job at CERN.
Although the World Wide Web began life in 1989, few doubt that its release into the public domain in 1993 was the true starting point for the medium that ended up bringing the Internet to the whole world.
