In Praise of the World Wide Web, Openness and Sharing

As you may have gathered, the World Wide Web celebrated its 20th birthday recently, since it was publicly announced for the first time on 6 August 1991. I came to it relatively late, at the beginning of 1994, but it has nonetheless been a privilege to watch it grow from relatively humble beginnings as a tool for researchers, to its present central role in modern society....

...In fact, as Berners-Lee recounts in his book, “Weaving the Web”, he originally hoped to release the code under the GNU GPL. Although he was quite at ease with this, he recognised that very few people in the wider world of computing would be, and that this might be a problem. In the end, then, he chose to put it into the public domain, opening it up completely, to avoid issues the rather more exotic GPL might have caused with more traditional computing types....