The World Wide Web: A Success Story for Open Software
In the beginning, it was all about information management
When, in the late 1980s, physicist and computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee made several proposals to his superiors at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), no one could have predicted what would come of it.
His core idea: an alternative to hierarchical information systems through a network-like structure of interconnected notes. This concept became the blueprint for the World Wide Web.
The openness of the World Wide Web as a goal from the very beginning
On November 12, 1990, Tim Berners-Lee and his colleague Robert Cailliau jointly published a memorandum titled: “WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project.” This memorandum was an important milestone on the path to the creation of the World Wide Web.
The concept of free access to the “WorldWideWeb” was already present at this point. This is because one of the project’s goals, as defined in the memorandum, was “to use public domain software wherever possible, or interface to proprietary systems which already exist.”
However, some time would pass before public-domain software became a reality, as the Web was still little more than a very exciting idea. The software required for the Web was subsequently developed by a small team at CERN.
This was the core Web software, which was compiled into a software library consisting of individual program components. These software building blocks were intended to enable external programmers to develop their own projects for the Web, whether browsers, servers, or other applications.
The Path to Open Access to the World Wide Web
The question that now arose was how to make this software, developed at CERN, accessible. Should it be sold to interested web pioneers for a fee, or should it be made available for free?
It took Tim Berners-Lee some persuasion to convince his superiors at CERN to make the developed software freely available. His colleague Robert Cailliau later described it in his book „How the Web Was born“: Berners-Lee argued that the World Wide Web followed an academic tradition because it promoted the free exchange of information. Therefore, he argued, the software necessary for the Web should also be made available free of charge.
In turn, CERN management circulated a cost estimate that was to serve as the price for the software. It amounted to a price range between 100 and 200 Swiss francs per software package.
However, a look at the very early Web at that time gave management a reality check regarding the proposed price. The small number of Web users at the time made it seem to CERN that charging fees for the software would not cover the costs. The administrative burden was simply considered too high.
“Collaborators welcome!”
And so it came to pass that Tim Berners-Lee received permission from CERN to make the Web software developed there available for free use on the Internet. On August 6, 1991, he announced via the alt.hypertext newsgroup that the software was available for download on the CERN website. He accompanied this with the call, “Collaborators welcome!”
The CERN website, located at Info.cern.ch, became an important resource on the early Web from that point on. There, users could download the software from an FTP server, which allowed the Web to gradually expand. This software included a library of program code (known as CERNLIB), software for running a server, as well as for the client. Shortly thereafter, the first web server outside of Europe went online. It was located at Stanford University in the United States, and the rest is history.
The World Wide Web works even though it is used by widely dispersed, very different computers with different software applications and different file formats. This is made possible by the so-called client-server model. The client—for example, a web browser or an email program—is the one making the request. It sends a request to a server. This server provides the data requested by the client in hypertext, plain text, or another data format.
Public Domain as the Starting Point for the World Wide Web’s Triumph
Once the World Wide Web had gained momentum in 1993, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailiau finally succeeded in convincing their superiors at CERN to make the software for the Web available to the public as public domain. In a statement dated April 30, 1993, CERN waived all of its intellectual property rights to the Web code, including both the source code and the binary files. It granted everyone permission to use, reproduce, modify, and distribute the code.
In the “World-Wide Web News,” a monthly newsletter from CERN, the May 1993 issue reported:
„CERN W3 Software Goes Public Domain
After much discussion, CERN has now released a certain subset of the W3 software as public domain code. This was done in order to further the spread of the web, and to ensure that the protocols were used in a consistent way. There had been a danger of developers having to all re-invent the protocol code, and remake incompatible mistakes. Now the „libwww“ code library which forms the basis of many of the browsers is in the public domain, this can serve as a common basis.”
It Almost Became GNU
Incidentally, Tim Berners-Lee had originally considered releasing the Web software not as public domain, but under a GNU license. Relations between CERN and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) with its GNU Project were good.
However, CERN was concerned that large IT companies might ignore the Web if there were any risk of licensing issues. Thus, the decision was made to make the software openly available in the public domain. This gave programmers around the globe maximum freedom to use CERN’s software for their projects.
Open Software as the Key to Creativity and Collaboration
Looking back, Tim Berners-Lee stated in 2025 in The Guardian that his vision for the Web was based on “sharing, not exploitation.” His goal, he said, was to use the Web to create a space for creativity and collaboration.
To achieve this, he noted, it was necessary for all interested parties to have low-barrier access to the Web and to be willing to contribute their ideas and skills. He saw this as the central challenge. It would therefore have been impossible to require interested users to “pay for each search or upload”.
Free software as the key to a collaborative and creative webosphere sounds familiar. Anyone looking for visions of the web of the future today is welcome to draw inspiration from the web’s early days.
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DOI for this text: · Automatic DOI assignment for blogs via The Rogue Scholar
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