Had ik in het oude forum nog geprobeerd je zo goed mogelijk voor te lichten :o)
1983 internet - zoals wij het nu kennen dateert van 1983 maar het was grotendeels gebaseerd op ARPANET, het Advanced Research Project Agency van het Amerikaanse ministerie van Defensie. Dat net was al sinds 1969 operationeel. Desondanks:
- Not a single line of the computer code which underpins the Net is proprietary;
and nobody who contributed to its development has ever made a cent from
intellectual property rights in it.
-- A brief History of the Future: The origins of the internet
1991 www - door toedoen van Tim Berners-Lee verandert internet in 1993 in het World Wide Web waar iedereen al klikkend in kan grasduinen. Dit doordat hij HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) en het bijpassende HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) introduceerde.
De metamorfose was compleet toen met het verschijnen van de eerste echte browser, Mosaic, ook de IMG-tag voor plaatjes aan HTML toegevoegd werd. Toeziend voogd Berners-Lee was daar tegen maar nu is er geen houden meer aan:
- It took radio 37 years to reach 50 million listeners, and TV about 15 years to reach 50
million viewers. The World Wide Web took just over 3 years to acquire 50 million users.
-- A brief History of the Future: The origins of the internet
Jij verbindt uitvindingen met patenteren. Hij, Berners-Lee, heeft zich net als anderen ook afwijzend uitgelaten over patenten:
Chapter 13 - Machines and the Web
The ethos now seems to be that patents are a matter of whatever you can get away with. Engineers, asked by company lawyers to provide patentable ideas every few months, resignedly hand over “ideas” that make the engineers themselves cringe.
It is time for a change, to an ethos in which companies use patents to defend their own valid products, rather than serendipitously suing based on claims even they themselves would have thought applied. The threshold of “innovation” is too low. Corporate lawyers are locked into a habit of arguing whatever advantage they can, and probably only determined corporate leadership can set the industry back on a sane track. The consortium members have, at the time of writing, been delivering on what to do, but it is not clear what the result will be.
The Semantic Web, like the Web already, will make many things previously impossible just obvious. As I write about the new technology, I do wonder whether it will be a technical dream or a legal nightmare.