Tim Berners-Lee gave the web away for free. That decision shaped everything.
In 1993, Tim Berners-Lee made a decision that shaped the modern world: he gave the World Wide Web away for free. No patents, no licensing fees, no royalties. CERN released the technology into the public domain, and the web became everyone’s.
Reading his memoir “This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web” [1], I was struck by how personal that decision was. This wasn’t a corporate strategy. It was a conviction. Berners-Lee believed the web’s value would come from universality, not ownership. The more people who could use it, the more powerful it would become.
