Tim Berners-Lee—Gave the World Wide Web to humanity freely - no patents, no royalties
On April 30, 1993, CERN released the World Wide Web software into the public domain, with Berners-Lee's advocacy ensuring no patents or royalties would restrict its use. This decision enabled the web's explosive growth - today half the world's population is online with nearly 2 billion websites. Berners-Lee could have made billions licensing the technology but chose to give it away freely.
Scoring Impact
| Topic | Direction | Relevance | Contribution |
|---|---|---|---|
| Knowledge Access & Information Freedom | +toward | primary | +1.00 |
| Open Internet & Web Freedom | +toward | primary | +1.00 |
| Open Source | +toward | secondary | +0.50 |
| Overall incident score = | +0.983 | ||
Score = avg(topic contributions) × significance (critical ×2) × confidence (0.59)
Evidence (1 signal)
Gave the World Wide Web to humanity freely - no patents, no royalties
On April 30, 1993, CERN released the World Wide Web software into the public domain, with Berners-Lee's advocacy ensuring no patents or royalties would restrict its use. This decision enabled the web's explosive growth - today half the world's population is online with nearly 2 billion websites. Berners-Lee could have made billions licensing the technology but chose to give it away freely.