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What If Tim Berners-Lee Had Patented the Web?

Posted by timothy on from the welcome-to-compuserve-again dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Last week Slashdot had the story that the web had turned 20 years old. Of course, patents also last 20 years, which has resulted in some asking what would have happened if Tim Berners-Lee had patented the web? Thankfully, he didn't (and wouldn't). But we'd be living in a very different (and probably less interesting) world if he had."

1 of 154 comments (clear)

  1. Re:gopher by Teancum · · Score: 4, Informative

    Then gopher would have been developed into something similar.

    There were so many other potential software packages that were doing essentially the same thing that the web was doing that I'd have to agree with this statement. It should be noted that SGML was already being used when Tim Berners-Lee introduced the sub-set that is known as HTML. It was already an interenational standard, as was HTTP, which was mostly a re-worked variant of FTP and other similar file transfer protocols.