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Without wanting to sound dismissive to the massive contribution Tim Berners-Lee, and CERN as a whole, has made to IT; we’d probably have ended up with the same user experience we have today but with Gopher as the base tech. Or maybe something else entirely different from markup perspective, such as something RTF or s-expressions...?

Great technological advancements are rarely the work of one genius in isolation. Usually it requires the imagination of a great many people to be captured. By which point the world is already ready for such an invention so it becomes more of an evolutionary breakthrough rather than a one idea that couldn’t be recreated.

[JorgeGT]

I agree, but if you patent certain processes, concepts, etc. early on, you can get filthy rich as everyone has to license your technology.

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In theory, yes. But there are a few caveats to that:

1. CERN wouldn’t have been able to patent anything too generalised because there was prior art (Gopher)

2. Thus if the patent was too expensive developers would have just used a similar technology (bare in mind it took quite a few years before the web to evolve from a toy, then something that companies “needed” but it wasn’t contributing massively to their bottom line, to what it is today where a great many businesses sole market is web based).

3. Even if it had somehow became part of industry standard or CERN had achieved a vague patent that prevented similar implementations from coexisting, Europe has this thing called (if I remember the acronym correctly) FRAND patents where patents which are required as part of a standard have to be fairly licensed.

None of this means CERN couldn’t have potentially made a lot from HTML & HTTP. But I also think part of the reason it was the success it was, was because it was a royalty free open specification.