Fifteen years ago on April 30, 1993 Tim Berners-Lee, a physicist at the CERN Physics Lab in Geneva Switzerland presented the networking protocols that created the World Wide Web. (No – NOT Al Gore!!) The Internet, such as it was back then, was the child of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPANet, 1969), and had become a disparate mash-up of competing proprietary networks, such as CompuServe (remember), and the fledgling American On-Line, Gopher (see below), and others my foggy memory will not recall. You paid a fee to gain access to the information these Internet gatekeepers thought was valuable. There wasn’t much in the way of a browser, Mosaic was a few months away from releasing the browser that would become Netscape.
One of these early Internet access methods was called "Gopher" and was invented here at the University of Minnesota. If the U of M had decided to let Gopher go open-source, instead of trying to monetize it and keep it proprietary, we might just be surfing the GGG, the Galactic Gopher Gateway, instead of the World Wide Web.
The board at CERN needed to make a similar decision, and set the World Wide Web free, to serve the greater good of information and humanity everywhere. The rest is history.
There always seem to be two schools of thought at work in the world of commerce. One thinks of the world as a fixed sum game, a single pie, and these people are determined to "get their piece of the pie." And then there are those who see the world as a pie factory, where you can always make more pie. If the Internet had not been turned loose back in 1993, it would not be the phenomenon it is today. Did Tim Berners-Lee turn down a fortune when he "gave away" his best idea? I think if we were to check, we would find that he is doing fine financially, and is one of the acknowledged experts in the field.
The lesson here is that not everything has to be for profit, or locked up, or owned. Not everything needs to be patented or copyrighted. Some things we are doing could just be given away as a gift to the greater good. We could just make more pie.
MAY
About the Author:
I am a cybersecurity and IT instructor, cybersecurity analyst, pen-tester, trainer, and speaker. I am an owner of the WyzCo Group Inc. In addition to consulting on security products and services, I also conduct security audits, compliance audits, vulnerability assessments and penetration tests. I also teach Cybersecurity Awareness Training classes. I work as an information technology and cybersecurity instructor for several training and certification organizations. I have worked in corporate, military, government, and workforce development training environments I am a frequent speaker at professional conferences such as the Minnesota Bloggers Conference, Secure360 Security Conference in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, the (ISC)2 World Congress 2016, and the ISSA International Conference 2017, and many local community organizations, including Chambers of Commerce, SCORE, and several school districts. I have been blogging on cybersecurity since 2006 at http://wyzguyscybersecurity.com