Thirty years ago, the research institute CERN put the World Wide Web into the public domain. As a result, anyone with an internet connection was able to share information with each other over a centralized network.

In an internal document on April 30, 1993, CERN, which until then held the copyright to the project, “waived all intellectual property rights in the code” and stated that “permission is given to anyone to use, copy, modify and redistribute it”. A year later, a new version of the software was released under an open source model rather than being put into the public domain, so that CERN still held the copyright.

Dutchman Walter Hoagland, one of the CERN employees who signed the document, mentions the move in an interview On this anniversary “The Best We Can Do and the source of the World Wide Web’s success, besides of course the Web itself”. In June 1993 World Wide Web calculated 130 pages. By the end of 1993, there were already 623 pages, including those of Bloomberg, The New York Times, and The Louvre.

The World Wide Web project was conceived in 1989 by CERN employee Sir Tim Berners-Lee. The idea was to integrate existing collaboration and archiving tools from the academic and scientific world into a new system. In 1990, he developed the concept in collaboration with Belgian engineer Robert Cailleux. Posted on December 20, 1990 The first site.