案例库 · 战略与领导 · 战略决策 · 1991-1993
这条还没译成中文，下面是英文原文。
The Web beat Gopher by being given away: public domain vs license fees
In 1993 CERN put WWW software in the public domain while Minnesota planned Gopher license fees; zero-cost openness made the Web inevitable.
CERN · University of Minnesota (Gopher)
那一手
In the early 1990s Gopher, created at the University of Minnesota, was the internet's leading organized document service: a distributed protocol for browsing and retrieving files through menus, described in RFC 1436 (March 1993).
In February 1993 the University of Minnesota announced it would charge licensing fees for its Gopher server implementation, and users worried the fees might extend to independent implementations. Expansion stagnated at the worst possible moment, just as the World Wide Web was taking off with more flexible hypertext.
On 30 April 1993 CERN issued a public statement putting the three components of Web software, the line-mode client, the server and the common code library, in the public domain: CERN relinquishes all intellectual property rights to this code, both source and binary, and anyone could use, duplicate, modify and distribute it. Web adoption then ran ahead on openness alone.
为什么管用
- Public domain removed permission and payment risk for every adopter.
- The Web's hypertext was more flexible than Gopher's menu hierarchy.
- The licensing announcement hit Gopher just as its growth window closed.
可以搬走什么
When protocols are close in capability, the lower adoption cost wins, and the cheapest license is no license: a standard you must pay for carries risk, one you can take and change carries none.
后来呢
Gopher's expansion stagnated after the fee announcement while the Web grew into the internet's dominant information system. Minnesota re-licensed its Gopher software under the GPL in September 2000, but by then the Web had won; the episode became the standard case for why openness beats ownership in protocol wars.
资料来源
- Licensing the Web: public releases of Web software (CERN)
- Gopher decline == licensing fees (LWN.net, 2020)
- RFC 1436: The Internet Gopher Protocol
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