The act of generosity that changed the world

Jason Lefkowitz musing on the decision to put the original web technologies into the public domain:

“if Berners-Lee and Cailliau had chosen to lock WWW up they could have [a lot of money].” But of course, the foundation for all those successes was the fact that the Web was an open platform. Building something like the Web we know today, in other words, required as its first, catalytic step a fundamental act of generosity.

“A fundamental act of generosity” I love that. Very different than a fundamental act “how do we capture this value for ourselves and monetize it”.

thank you to Berners-Lee, Cailliau and CERN. Their generosity changed the direction of history — but (more importantly to me!) it changed my life, too. It made my life, at least that part of it I have lived to date. And that’s something worth being thankful for.

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