8 ms·

The web’s most important decision

236 points by zdw 4y ago

burglins 4y ago
For me as a kid, there was a huge gap between something that was free and something that was not. The difference between asking my parents for something and just getting (downloading) it. I now have my own disposable income, but I still think long and hard in case I have to spend money; the actual price being secondary to the fact, that the thing is not free.
- yata69420 4y ago
  100% agree. Also I bucket "free" into "data harvesting", "actually gratis", or "libre".
  - msla 4y ago
    > Also I bucket "free" into "data harvesting", "actually gratis", or "libre". Yes, and beware of the people who want you to ignore the second two categories. "If you aren't the customer, you're the product" is an insidious way to make you think there's no escape from being monetized, while simultaneously lying to you by saying you won't be a product if you pay using money. It's pretty universal that paying customers are a product sold to bigger customers, and I'm very wary of the motives of anyone who wants me to forget that.
  - phantomathkg 4y ago
    Curious, what is the difference between "actually gratis" and "libre"?
    - godshatter 4y ago
      Not the parent poster, but I'm assuming "actually gratis" means "free as in beer" (doesn't cost money, presumably with no data harvesting) while "libre" means "free as in speech" (open source license of some kind).
    - deleted 4y ago
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- deleted 4y ago
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- josephg 4y ago
  Yeah; I have the same reaction to products like Notion or Figma where someone is footing the bill to keep servers on. And if those servers ever turn off, I lose access to my stuff. Either I'm paying for a product, and as soon as I stop paying, I've lost access to my stuff (Figma, Notion). Or the product is free, and someone is somehow intending to make money from me being their user. They'll either start charging down the line, or they're selling my data or my attention to advertisers (tiktok, twitter, etc). I don't think I like using SAAS products because its never really free. At least not in the same way the web is free or vim is free.
  - yinyang_in 4y ago
    Really looking for notion alternatives, notion works for me, but no good alternatives. If you’ve some, do share those
    - psadauskas 4y ago
      Obsidian
    - aidos 4y ago
      An open source alternative to Notion is Outline. I’ve only looked at it, not used it in anger so I can’t offer much other guidance. https://www.getoutline.com/ https://www.getoutline.com/
  - chrisweekly 4y ago
    In stark contrast to those 2 examples of Notion and Figma, consider Obsidian. With its massive OSS plugin ecosystem, it approximates their combined capabilities, but has a foundation of offline-first, local markdown files.
    - sunbum 4y ago
      In what world does Obsidian come even close to having any overlapping features that Figma has?
- cheeze 4y ago
  Which is why, as a kid, I was fine with piracy. I couldn't have bought Photoshop in a million years, and back then there was no free for education or whatnot. These days, I can afford it. Hell, I even bought Winrar as a thanks for many years of using it.
  - Cthulhu_ 4y ago
    Same, we had so much more access to e.g. games (on different platforms); we didn't have the disposable income for consoles but we did save up for a PC and that basically launched my career. On the other hand, that was an early indication of the entitlement that we have; we rail against the streaming services and resort to piracy not because it's unfair that they ask for money, but because we believe we're entitled to consume content. We're afraid of missing out, too. So it's a bit of a mixed bag I think.
- eviks 4y ago
  Friction is the killer of free movement!
deleted 4y ago
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ipcress_file 4y ago
I have a gopher hole. So do a few hundred other people on this planet. The Gopher-sphere's a slow, thoughtful place.
- mooooooooooooo 4y ago
  How would one go about exploring the gopher-sphere?
  - defrost 4y ago
    cURL and netcat are gopher clients, of course ... but it's likely easier to start with a chrome extension, eg: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/burrow-gopherspace-explor/plhaaggiajlcjclagmjnjmaonhkdhhji https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/burrow-gopherspace... (via OverBite: http://gopher.floodgap.com/overbite/ http://gopher.floodgap.com/overbite/ ) and reading up a bit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) then dip a toe into the community forums.
  - ipcress_file 4y ago
    You can access gopher using a regular browser through Floodgap's proxy: http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw A good gopher hole to visit to find recently-updated material is here: gopher://i-logout.cz/1/bongusta/ Using a terminal, the old lynx browser is probably the most widely available and user-friendly client. If you want a GUI, Skyjake's Lagrange browser is beautiful and available for Linux, Mac, and Windows: https://github.com/skyjake/lagrange https://github.com/skyjake/lagrange
bsuvc 4y ago
> In February of 1993, the University of Minnesota made an announcement. In specific commercial usage of the protocol, they would be charging licensing fees. Not large fees, and not in all cases. But, in some small way, they would be restricting access. I remember gopher and thinking it was pretty useful and easy to use. This decision by them seems to have been a monumental mistake. I'm curious if anyone here knows who at Minnesota made this decision and why. That, to me, is another interesting aspect to this story, but it is understandable people are more reluctant to talk about a failure than a success.
- neom 4y ago
  https://www.funet.fi/pub/vms/networking/gopher/gopher-software-licensing-policy.ancient https://www.funet.fi/pub/vms/networking/gopher/gopher-softwa... https://www.minnpost.com/business/2016/08/rise-and-fall-gopher-protocol/ https://www.minnpost.com/business/2016/08/rise-and-fall-goph...
  - bsuvc 4y ago
    Perfect, thank you so much. That was an interesting read and exactly what I was looking for!
  - bruce511 4y ago
    It's interesting to read the first link, but with DNS in mind instead of gopher. All the resource arguments still apply, and indeed DNS is not free, but equally also not expensive. Now granted, DNS has a scarcity component, and if it was free it would basically be consumed by bots and be useless. So back to Gopher. Which was going to license the server software (? - it's unclear, but appears to be targeting the server), and is that not the business model Netscape adopted? Which was then subsumed by Apache and IIS? So I guess I'm somewhat confused as to the actual benefit of the CERN "release" - (allowing others to create servers and clients?) - although clearly it may have been instrumental in gaining mindshare.
    - tpmx 4y ago
      CERN httpd (1990) and NCSA httpd (1993) came before Netscape Netsite (dec 1994) and were both free and open source. When Netscape did launch their server it was relatively expensive starting at $1495. For $5000 you got SSL support: https://books.google.com/books?id=djgEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA10 https://books.google.com/books?id=djgEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA10. http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1995q1/0010.html http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1995q1/0010.ht... MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (December 15, 1994) -- Netscape Communications Corporation today announced the availability of the 1.0 versions of its Netscape Navigatorand Netsite server line, including the Netsite Commerce Serverwith integrated security. The availability of these open software products, announced in September, enables Netscape Communications to offer the first complete, secure client/server software system for conducting commerce and exchanging information via the Internet and private TCP/IP networks. Also: https://webdevelopmenthistory.com/1995-apache-microsoft-iis-web-server-market/ https://webdevelopmenthistory.com/1995-apache-microsoft-iis-... According to The Web Server Book, at the second International WWW Conference, held in Chicago in October 1994, a straw poll of attendees showed that “90 percent of present Webmasters used the NCSA server”
shortformblog 4y ago
Shout-out to Adam Curry, who wore a Gopher T-shirt on MTV to pay for his Gopher license. I wrote something about this long ago, but Jay did a great job narrowing in on the pivotal moment. https://tedium.co/2017/06/22/modern-day-gopher-history/ https://tedium.co/2017/06/22/modern-day-gopher-history/
- neom 4y ago
  His IG of weird vintage tech shit is dope: https://www.instagram.com/adamc1999/ https://www.instagram.com/adamc1999/
abidlabs 4y ago
I wonder if the same will eventually hold true for "OpenAI"'s APIs vs. truly open-source AI
- amelius 4y ago
  Open AI is not taxpayer funded.
  - mkl95 4y ago
    It's not open, either. SaaSAI would be a more fitting name.
msla 4y ago
Compare with Project Xanadu, particularly micropayments: https://dubinko.info/blog/2009/11/how-xanadu-works/ https://dubinko.info/blog/2009/11/how-xanadu-works/ > All documents have a specific owner, are royalty-bearing, and work through a micropayment system. Anyone can quote, transclude, or modify any amount of anything, with the payments sorting themselves out accordingly. If you're of the right philosophical bent, that sounds familiar: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Galambosianism https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Galambosianism > Galambosianism is an early precursor to libertarian philosophy promoted by an aerospace engineer named Andrew J. Galambos (1924-1997) during the 1960s. He gave a series of for-pay classes starting with "V-50" ("The Theory of Volition"). Unlike other precursors to libertarianism (such as the ideas of Ayn Rand, Robert LeFevre, Albert Jay Nock, and Ludwig von Mises), Galambos' ideas have largely been thrown in the dustbin of history by his fellow libertarians. > Galambos called himself a liberal, but in reality was philosophically somewhat closer to anarcho-capitalism. One of the core ideas of his philosophy, and the main sticking point preventing broader acceptance of it, was his belief in absolute intellectual property rights, meaning the inventor or originator of an idea should have absolute, lifelong heritable control over that idea and all the profits derived from it. [snip] > Other libertarians quickly found Galambosians to be obstinate cranks. Reportedly, Andrew Galambos and Ayn Rand once met and within five minutes each had declared the other insane. Also reportedly, Galambos would keep a jar or coffee can next to him when speaking in public, into which he would drop a nickel or dime any time he mentioned the name of another person, or mentioned an idea or phrase attributed to another person, to symbolize he was paying "royalties" to them for his use of their intellectual property. He went so far as to drop a nickel in "royalties" to the long-dead Thomas Paine every time he used the word "liberty", on the mistaken belief that the word was invented by Paine. Also reportedly, he was born Joseph Andrew Galambos, Jr. but legally changed his name to Andrew Joseph Galambos so he wouldn't infringe on his father's intellectual property rights. [snip] > Needless to say, a wiki article discussing Galambosianism should not be allowed in a free society, but it is okay only if you drop a nickel in the jar after reading this article. I wonder if Ted Nelson ever pays royalties to Galambos. Probably not, the slacker.
anoy8888 4y ago
The impact of AI models will be as big as the web , now it is the critical defining moment of LLMs. Are we going to allow a few big companies control our access to AI ? This can happen just like Apple App Store . We must find a way to make AI free for all
- amw-zero 4y ago
  Predicting the future is hard. People said this same thing about cryptocurrencies, no?
  - evilspammer 4y ago
    Yes and it will happen with LLMs too AI has a hype cycle and young people are seeing their first one before the next AI winter
  - tempestn 4y ago
    The difference to me is that the utility of cryptocurrency was always mostly hypothetical. LLMs are useful now, and can only get more so. I do agree that we're currently in a hype cycle though; I just think it's akin to the 90s dotcom bubble. That was over-hyped too, but it didn't mean the internet wasn't going to change the world.
    - tkgally 4y ago
      > I do agree that we're currently in a hype cycle though; I just think it's akin to the 90s dotcom bubble. Yes. I remember attending a professional conference around 1996 or 1997. One of the presenters spoke about the Internet and how we could supposedly use it in our work. Some people in the audience were doubtful (partly because the live demonstration didn’t go well due to problems getting a dial-up connection) and said it just seemed like a bunch of hype. Someone in the audience responded, as I recall, “Yes, there is a lot of hype about the Internet now. But it’s clearly becoming useful, and it won’t be hype forever.” I feel the same way now about LLMs.
    - eru 4y ago
      If you made a steady monthly investment into an index of NASDAQ stocks throughout the dotcom boom time and then just held them, you would have done reasonably well today. So arguable there was no dotcom 'bubble' in the sense that the dotcom stocks weren't overvalued as a whole. (Not all individual stocks did well. But the future is always hard to predict. And stock prices are about expected values of future prices, actually realised futures can differ.) The dotcom bust was real though: dotcom stocks were way too cheap after the so called 'bubble' burst, in the sense that buying an index of NASDAQ stocks then and holding them until today would have given you crazy outsized returns.
butlerm 4y ago
This article could use some precision about exactly what rights they were giving up. Rights to the "World Wide Web" not so much. Specific copyrights and patent rights are something else. There could have been patents that were essential and might have put the World Wide Web as we know it in a deep freeze from the beginning.
- vivegi 4y ago
  It is there in the original CERN approval letter at the bottom of the article. CERN was relinquishing rights and putting into public domain the following three software artefacts and binaries. - W3 basic ("line-mode") client - W3 basic server - W3 library of common code
kristopolous 4y ago
And this is the real difference between him and Ted Nelson. Nelson fantasizes about being the media mogul of a publishing empire under his technology. It's ultimately a proprietary format play. This is the significant difference. I tried to explain it to Ted, personally, in Sausalito about 10 years ago over a lunch, as politely as I could. You need to blow it open, as much as possible and make it as easy as possible without necessitating others to opt in. Information networks can't be built by an authoritarian conquer and covet strategy. It's been tried countless times and history has zero successful test cases to study with that strategy. From DIVX to Flexplay, dvd-d to any format war ever, crippleware rent-seeking is a death knell. It will firebomb the most successful thing into oblivion overnight. I failed to convince him this was the key difference. Ah well.
- agumonkey 4y ago
  What was his response ?
  - kristopolous 4y ago
    He disagreed that the difference was materially significant. You need to be able to believe in a positive vision of constructive property-less mutual-aid Proudhon style anarchy to hop on board. I'm totally willing to accept this is like <1% of people when it comes to their magnum opus. But heck, you're never going to achieve exceptional things by behaving like everyone else. Embrace the spectrum.
- calineczka 4y ago
  What about MP3, MP4, H264 etc? Aren't they good examples of successful formats despite the necessary licensing fees etc?
  - mjevans 4y ago
    They're successful mostly because (many) end users ignore patents; at least the ones that don't work at large companies with dedicated legal departments (and targets on their back because they have actual money). Further, that's why Vorbis, VP9, AV1 etc, show less adoption, even though they're free, for end users the other formats have been baked into hardware that only works with the closed ecosystems and the average guy can ignore the patents and continue to work with that non-free ecosystem.
MilStdJunkie 4y ago
Familiar genre of story. Ever wonder why we don't see as much Docbook around as we might? I mean, aside from its XML Hellscape? Whelp. Because a lot of the widgets in this "open standard" are tied to closed license tools. Take //revisionbar -> //fo:change-bar-begin. Go ahead and try to run that through Saxon. Yeah, that's right, the Official Opentopia DocBook FO gives you an element that can only get processed into PDF via vendor FO processors. And those vendors are NOT cheap. Crap like this fed the growth of web-based PDF engines like WeasyPrint, Vivliostyle, Paged.js, Prawn, and, on the paid side, Prince. Incidentally, making changebars with Asciidoctor and Paged is a frickin' snap, and you do it from git CLI instead of hand-coding every goddamn change bar. (But wait! You can hire yet another closed source tool to do a docbook diff that inserts the markup that can only be interpreted by another closed source tool! SIGN ME UP) We're not even going to touch the many, many, many XML specifications that ride on proprietary blobs in their own PIs - without which the XML is completely unparseable. Or dual mode validation with DTDs riding alongside schemas in delightfully undefined ways. Or . . or . . blabbity blabbity blah. Short version, whatever extra functionality was gained from XML publishing - and I'm not convinced there were any gains at all, even theoretical ones - was largely just not worth these sorts of traps. So today the whole ecosystem is today one that's largely based on government requirements and the starry-eyed consultants who love them. The rest of techcomm picked up lightweight markup or joined the Church of Madcap.
- meindnoch 4y ago
  I have no idea what half of those things are, but sounds like a pain in the ass.
DanielKehoe 4y ago
In 1991, I wanted to write about the WWW for NeXTWORLD magazine. Tim Berners-Lee replied to my email, saying he was reluctant to widely publicize that code for the web was available for free, as management at CERN had not yet agreed to release it publicly. The web grew slowly the first two years. At the time, I really didn't understand his hesitance, but in hindsight it was for the best. Two years ago, I wrote about the early days of the web on its 30th anniversary [0]. To me, Tim Berners-Lee is brilliant not just for his vision of a WorldWideWeb and its technical underpinnings, but also for an astute political streak in shepherding it to widespread adoption. I appreciate Jay Hoffmann (the article's author) for marking the significance of the anniversary. [0] https://danielkehoe.com/posts/early-days-of-the-web-1991/ https://danielkehoe.com/posts/early-days-of-the-web-1991/
- WillAdams 4y ago
  TBL's book _Weaving the Web_: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/821987 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/821987 seemed a really good overview/history to me and is one which I always recommend. He certainly earned his prominent rôle in the Y2K celebrations.
  - cxr 4y ago
    > TBL's book _Weaving the Web_ Which, notably, is not made accessible via URL—at least not a "first-class" URL by the author/publisher; if you want to refer someone to the contents of a specific passage—or the entire book, even—then your best bet is with something like OpenLibrary, which has made it accessible in a fairly messy and roundabout way. Not a great endorsement for the vision of the Web as it was intended (vs how it is actually used).
    - WillAdams 4y ago
      Not sure what link you mean. https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Weaving/Overview.html https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Weaving/Overview.html seems fine to me. The book itself isn't on the web (although it was authored in a web page editor, Navipress) --- I don't think TBL has ever said that _all_ information/text would be on the Web so not understanding your point? Arguably that it's not is another nod to/acknowledgement of what Ted Nelson wanted to do w/ Xanadu but failed.
sylware 4y ago
But today, this is irrelevant as the "web" was stolen by blackrock and vanguard big tech companies. It was sneaky and malicious: A "web engine" became grotesquely and absurdely massive and complex, and that includes its SDK (yeah, a c++ compiler is even worse) and only very few can actually "work". Only google and apple provide "for free" web engines: blink and google financed geeko (firefox) from google, and webkit from apple. The only way to build those is with gcc (~MIT) or clang/llvm (~apple). And you call that digital freedom? Those are digital digital chains. The only way out is hardcore regulation with noscript/basic html browsers and simple but able to do good enough job protocols, and that stable in time (for instance irc if there is a text chat).
- eru 4y ago
  > [...] blackrock and vanguard big tech companies. What do you mean by that? Are you talking about index funds or something? > The only way out is hardcore regulation with noscript/basic html browsers and simple but able to do good enough job protocols, and that stable in time (for instance irc if there is a text chat). The cure sounds worse than the disease..
- unethical_ban 4y ago
  "Oh no, all this complete free and open source software exists but it's complex". Gemini exists, gopher exists, and it is completely possible to make websites with no JavaScript. You're demonizing Firefox and MIT and calling their output digital chains. It's fair to say that is a fringe opinion. Let's get angry that TCP is complicated, too. How many open source TCP stacks are there? And Ethernet! Only one cable standard. Who is behind it? Xerox!
somat 4y ago
The brilliant piece of the web, the bit that was revolutionary, the bit that most web alternatives not only fail to implement but appear to be fundamentally unable to implement, because let's face it, this is a terrible idea. is the idea that one web document can load any other web document. Hypercard is the common bogey man for a better web that failed, but in my mind the closest modern web alternative that failed to do this is the app store. now I know why the app model does not let you load arbitrary resources and you know why the app model does not let you load arbitrary resources, but in the right sort of light, if you squint the right way, you can see what may have been, how perhaps the exec() syscall may have taken an argument, a url, of what to exec.
vrglvrglvrgl 4y ago
[dead]
lmarcos 4y ago
AI should follow the same principle. It has the potential to become as widespread as the web... And yet here we are paying a fee per N tokens to use GPT.
- eru 4y ago
  Allowing suppliers to make money is a standard way to induce more supply.
sanjeevverma1 4y ago
amazing read! BUT the images are no longer rendering...
grishka 4y ago
> And it’s still not done. And that's a shame. This ever-expanding scope of the web is a curse. We need to draw the line somewhere and just stop.
gitgud 4y ago
> "Thirty years ago, Tim Berners-Lee and CERN gave the world a gift..." The only reason the decision seems important now, is if you think the internet could of never been developed without the all-powerful minds of "Tim Berners-Lee and CERN"... As computers got faster an nations and companies wanted to communicate between computers. It seems inevitable that the only way to communicate with computers is was a decentralised open and free network... If it wasn't CERN, someone else would have built the internet...
- no_wizard 4y ago
  Lets be glad it was someone with the foresight to imagine it as an open protocol from the beginning though. Interoperable and free to use things around it. The fact that they didn't try to monetize the underlying tech is almost a miracle.
- ohitsdom 4y ago
  Look at the current internet landscape- most users interact, find, and share content through the walled gardens of social networks. I don't think "decentralized open and free" networks are at all inevitable. To me those characteristics are shrinking, not growing.
alasdairking 4y ago
Nah. Adding the IMG tag. Without that, it is text only, and destined for limited uptake like Prestel or CEEFAX.
- marbu 4y ago
  Img tag was important, but it doesn't mean that web was text only before the tag was introduced: people were linking to pictures in the same way how would one link to any other resource, and when you opened the link, the picture was shown in a new window.
marbu 4y ago
In How the Web was Born[1] I red that Tim also considered GPL at some point as he liked the FSF's approach, but as the OP notes in the post, he decided to go with public domain so that it would not scare off some companies from using libwww code. See also: https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web/licensing-web https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web/licensing-web [1] https://books.google.cz/books/about/How_the_Web_was_Born.html?id=pIH-JijUNS0C&redir_esc=y https://books.google.cz/books/about/How_the_Web_was_Born.htm...
- marbu 4y ago
  The whole early period of web development is quite interesting. The decision about the licensing was not the only crucial decision which made it succeed, like release of libwww, focus on super simple browser which works on any platform (line mode) or introduction of gateways ... Recently I wrote a blog post about it focusing on design of first browsers and forces which were driving it. https://blog.marbu.eu/posts/2023-04-29-the-first-web-browser/ https://blog.marbu.eu/posts/2023-04-29-the-first-web-browser... Btw early users of the web mostly didn't know about the original Tim's vision and the 1st web gui browser/editor prototype. See for example hn comment from someone who was using original line mode browser under a post about the first browser/editor: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34218748 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34218748

236 points by zdw 4y ago

For me as a kid, there was a huge gap between something that was free and something that was not. The difference between asking my parents for something and just getting (downloading) it. I now have my own disposable income, but I still think long and hard in case I have to spend money; the actual price being secondary to the fact, that the thing is not free.

yata69420 4y ago
100% agree. Also I bucket "free" into "data harvesting", "actually gratis", or "libre".
- msla 4y ago
  > Also I bucket "free" into "data harvesting", "actually gratis", or "libre". Yes, and beware of the people who want you to ignore the second two categories. "If you aren't the customer, you're the product" is an insidious way to make you think there's no escape from being monetized, while simultaneously lying to you by saying you won't be a product if you pay using money. It's pretty universal that paying customers are a product sold to bigger customers, and I'm very wary of the motives of anyone who wants me to forget that.
- phantomathkg 4y ago
  Curious, what is the difference between "actually gratis" and "libre"?
  - godshatter 4y ago
    Not the parent poster, but I'm assuming "actually gratis" means "free as in beer" (doesn't cost money, presumably with no data harvesting) while "libre" means "free as in speech" (open source license of some kind).
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
deleted 4y ago
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josephg 4y ago
Yeah; I have the same reaction to products like Notion or Figma where someone is footing the bill to keep servers on. And if those servers ever turn off, I lose access to my stuff. Either I'm paying for a product, and as soon as I stop paying, I've lost access to my stuff (Figma, Notion). Or the product is free, and someone is somehow intending to make money from me being their user. They'll either start charging down the line, or they're selling my data or my attention to advertisers (tiktok, twitter, etc). I don't think I like using SAAS products because its never really free. At least not in the same way the web is free or vim is free.
- yinyang_in 4y ago
  Really looking for notion alternatives, notion works for me, but no good alternatives. If you’ve some, do share those
  - psadauskas 4y ago
    Obsidian
  - aidos 4y ago
    An open source alternative to Notion is Outline. I’ve only looked at it, not used it in anger so I can’t offer much other guidance. https://www.getoutline.com/ https://www.getoutline.com/
- chrisweekly 4y ago
  In stark contrast to those 2 examples of Notion and Figma, consider Obsidian. With its massive OSS plugin ecosystem, it approximates their combined capabilities, but has a foundation of offline-first, local markdown files.
  - sunbum 4y ago
    In what world does Obsidian come even close to having any overlapping features that Figma has?
cheeze 4y ago
Which is why, as a kid, I was fine with piracy. I couldn't have bought Photoshop in a million years, and back then there was no free for education or whatnot. These days, I can afford it. Hell, I even bought Winrar as a thanks for many years of using it.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  Same, we had so much more access to e.g. games (on different platforms); we didn't have the disposable income for consoles but we did save up for a PC and that basically launched my career. On the other hand, that was an early indication of the entitlement that we have; we rail against the streaming services and resort to piracy not because it's unfair that they ask for money, but because we believe we're entitled to consume content. We're afraid of missing out, too. So it's a bit of a mixed bag I think.
eviks 4y ago
Friction is the killer of free movement!

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ipcress_file 4y ago

I have a gopher hole. So do a few hundred other people on this planet. The Gopher-sphere's a slow, thoughtful place.

mooooooooooooo 4y ago
How would one go about exploring the gopher-sphere?
- defrost 4y ago
  cURL and netcat are gopher clients, of course ... but it's likely easier to start with a chrome extension, eg: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/burrow-gopherspace-explor/plhaaggiajlcjclagmjnjmaonhkdhhji https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/burrow-gopherspace... (via OverBite: http://gopher.floodgap.com/overbite/ http://gopher.floodgap.com/overbite/ ) and reading up a bit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) then dip a toe into the community forums.
- ipcress_file 4y ago
  You can access gopher using a regular browser through Floodgap's proxy: http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw A good gopher hole to visit to find recently-updated material is here: gopher://i-logout.cz/1/bongusta/ Using a terminal, the old lynx browser is probably the most widely available and user-friendly client. If you want a GUI, Skyjake's Lagrange browser is beautiful and available for Linux, Mac, and Windows: https://github.com/skyjake/lagrange https://github.com/skyjake/lagrange

bsuvc 4y ago

> In February of 1993, the University of Minnesota made an announcement. In specific commercial usage of the protocol, they would be charging licensing fees. Not large fees, and not in all cases. But, in some small way, they would be restricting access. I remember gopher and thinking it was pretty useful and easy to use. This decision by them seems to have been a monumental mistake. I'm curious if anyone here knows who at Minnesota made this decision and why. That, to me, is another interesting aspect to this story, but it is understandable people are more reluctant to talk about a failure than a success.

neom 4y ago
https://www.funet.fi/pub/vms/networking/gopher/gopher-software-licensing-policy.ancient https://www.funet.fi/pub/vms/networking/gopher/gopher-softwa... https://www.minnpost.com/business/2016/08/rise-and-fall-gopher-protocol/ https://www.minnpost.com/business/2016/08/rise-and-fall-goph...
- bsuvc 4y ago
  Perfect, thank you so much. That was an interesting read and exactly what I was looking for!
- bruce511 4y ago
  It's interesting to read the first link, but with DNS in mind instead of gopher. All the resource arguments still apply, and indeed DNS is not free, but equally also not expensive. Now granted, DNS has a scarcity component, and if it was free it would basically be consumed by bots and be useless. So back to Gopher. Which was going to license the server software (? - it's unclear, but appears to be targeting the server), and is that not the business model Netscape adopted? Which was then subsumed by Apache and IIS? So I guess I'm somewhat confused as to the actual benefit of the CERN "release" - (allowing others to create servers and clients?) - although clearly it may have been instrumental in gaining mindshare.
  - tpmx 4y ago
    CERN httpd (1990) and NCSA httpd (1993) came before Netscape Netsite (dec 1994) and were both free and open source. When Netscape did launch their server it was relatively expensive starting at $1495. For $5000 you got SSL support: https://books.google.com/books?id=djgEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA10 https://books.google.com/books?id=djgEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA10. http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1995q1/0010.html http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1995q1/0010.ht... MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (December 15, 1994) -- Netscape Communications Corporation today announced the availability of the 1.0 versions of its Netscape Navigatorand Netsite server line, including the Netsite Commerce Serverwith integrated security. The availability of these open software products, announced in September, enables Netscape Communications to offer the first complete, secure client/server software system for conducting commerce and exchanging information via the Internet and private TCP/IP networks. Also: https://webdevelopmenthistory.com/1995-apache-microsoft-iis-web-server-market/ https://webdevelopmenthistory.com/1995-apache-microsoft-iis-... According to The Web Server Book, at the second International WWW Conference, held in Chicago in October 1994, a straw poll of attendees showed that “90 percent of present Webmasters used the NCSA server”

shortformblog 4y ago

Shout-out to Adam Curry, who wore a Gopher T-shirt on MTV to pay for his Gopher license. I wrote something about this long ago, but Jay did a great job narrowing in on the pivotal moment. https://tedium.co/2017/06/22/modern-day-gopher-history/ https://tedium.co/2017/06/22/modern-day-gopher-history/

neom 4y ago
His IG of weird vintage tech shit is dope: https://www.instagram.com/adamc1999/ https://www.instagram.com/adamc1999/

abidlabs 4y ago

I wonder if the same will eventually hold true for "OpenAI"'s APIs vs. truly open-source AI

amelius 4y ago
Open AI is not taxpayer funded.
- mkl95 4y ago
  It's not open, either. SaaSAI would be a more fitting name.

msla 4y ago

Compare with Project Xanadu, particularly micropayments: https://dubinko.info/blog/2009/11/how-xanadu-works/ https://dubinko.info/blog/2009/11/how-xanadu-works/ > All documents have a specific owner, are royalty-bearing, and work through a micropayment system. Anyone can quote, transclude, or modify any amount of anything, with the payments sorting themselves out accordingly. If you're of the right philosophical bent, that sounds familiar: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Galambosianism https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Galambosianism > Galambosianism is an early precursor to libertarian philosophy promoted by an aerospace engineer named Andrew J. Galambos (1924-1997) during the 1960s. He gave a series of for-pay classes starting with "V-50" ("The Theory of Volition"). Unlike other precursors to libertarianism (such as the ideas of Ayn Rand, Robert LeFevre, Albert Jay Nock, and Ludwig von Mises), Galambos' ideas have largely been thrown in the dustbin of history by his fellow libertarians. > Galambos called himself a liberal, but in reality was philosophically somewhat closer to anarcho-capitalism. One of the core ideas of his philosophy, and the main sticking point preventing broader acceptance of it, was his belief in absolute intellectual property rights, meaning the inventor or originator of an idea should have absolute, lifelong heritable control over that idea and all the profits derived from it. [snip] > Other libertarians quickly found Galambosians to be obstinate cranks. Reportedly, Andrew Galambos and Ayn Rand once met and within five minutes each had declared the other insane. Also reportedly, Galambos would keep a jar or coffee can next to him when speaking in public, into which he would drop a nickel or dime any time he mentioned the name of another person, or mentioned an idea or phrase attributed to another person, to symbolize he was paying "royalties" to them for his use of their intellectual property. He went so far as to drop a nickel in "royalties" to the long-dead Thomas Paine every time he used the word "liberty", on the mistaken belief that the word was invented by Paine. Also reportedly, he was born Joseph Andrew Galambos, Jr. but legally changed his name to Andrew Joseph Galambos so he wouldn't infringe on his father's intellectual property rights. [snip] > Needless to say, a wiki article discussing Galambosianism should not be allowed in a free society, but it is okay only if you drop a nickel in the jar after reading this article. I wonder if Ted Nelson ever pays royalties to Galambos. Probably not, the slacker.

anoy8888 4y ago

The impact of AI models will be as big as the web , now it is the critical defining moment of LLMs. Are we going to allow a few big companies control our access to AI ? This can happen just like Apple App Store . We must find a way to make AI free for all

amw-zero 4y ago
Predicting the future is hard. People said this same thing about cryptocurrencies, no?
- evilspammer 4y ago
  Yes and it will happen with LLMs too AI has a hype cycle and young people are seeing their first one before the next AI winter
- tempestn 4y ago
  The difference to me is that the utility of cryptocurrency was always mostly hypothetical. LLMs are useful now, and can only get more so. I do agree that we're currently in a hype cycle though; I just think it's akin to the 90s dotcom bubble. That was over-hyped too, but it didn't mean the internet wasn't going to change the world.
  - tkgally 4y ago
    > I do agree that we're currently in a hype cycle though; I just think it's akin to the 90s dotcom bubble. Yes. I remember attending a professional conference around 1996 or 1997. One of the presenters spoke about the Internet and how we could supposedly use it in our work. Some people in the audience were doubtful (partly because the live demonstration didn’t go well due to problems getting a dial-up connection) and said it just seemed like a bunch of hype. Someone in the audience responded, as I recall, “Yes, there is a lot of hype about the Internet now. But it’s clearly becoming useful, and it won’t be hype forever.” I feel the same way now about LLMs.
  - eru 4y ago
    If you made a steady monthly investment into an index of NASDAQ stocks throughout the dotcom boom time and then just held them, you would have done reasonably well today. So arguable there was no dotcom 'bubble' in the sense that the dotcom stocks weren't overvalued as a whole. (Not all individual stocks did well. But the future is always hard to predict. And stock prices are about expected values of future prices, actually realised futures can differ.) The dotcom bust was real though: dotcom stocks were way too cheap after the so called 'bubble' burst, in the sense that buying an index of NASDAQ stocks then and holding them until today would have given you crazy outsized returns.

butlerm 4y ago

This article could use some precision about exactly what rights they were giving up. Rights to the "World Wide Web" not so much. Specific copyrights and patent rights are something else. There could have been patents that were essential and might have put the World Wide Web as we know it in a deep freeze from the beginning.

vivegi 4y ago
It is there in the original CERN approval letter at the bottom of the article. CERN was relinquishing rights and putting into public domain the following three software artefacts and binaries. - W3 basic ("line-mode") client - W3 basic server - W3 library of common code

kristopolous 4y ago

And this is the real difference between him and Ted Nelson. Nelson fantasizes about being the media mogul of a publishing empire under his technology. It's ultimately a proprietary format play. This is the significant difference. I tried to explain it to Ted, personally, in Sausalito about 10 years ago over a lunch, as politely as I could. You need to blow it open, as much as possible and make it as easy as possible without necessitating others to opt in. Information networks can't be built by an authoritarian conquer and covet strategy. It's been tried countless times and history has zero successful test cases to study with that strategy. From DIVX to Flexplay, dvd-d to any format war ever, crippleware rent-seeking is a death knell. It will firebomb the most successful thing into oblivion overnight. I failed to convince him this was the key difference. Ah well.

agumonkey 4y ago
What was his response ?
- kristopolous 4y ago
  He disagreed that the difference was materially significant. You need to be able to believe in a positive vision of constructive property-less mutual-aid Proudhon style anarchy to hop on board. I'm totally willing to accept this is like <1% of people when it comes to their magnum opus. But heck, you're never going to achieve exceptional things by behaving like everyone else. Embrace the spectrum.
calineczka 4y ago
What about MP3, MP4, H264 etc? Aren't they good examples of successful formats despite the necessary licensing fees etc?
- mjevans 4y ago
  They're successful mostly because (many) end users ignore patents; at least the ones that don't work at large companies with dedicated legal departments (and targets on their back because they have actual money). Further, that's why Vorbis, VP9, AV1 etc, show less adoption, even though they're free, for end users the other formats have been baked into hardware that only works with the closed ecosystems and the average guy can ignore the patents and continue to work with that non-free ecosystem.

MilStdJunkie 4y ago

Familiar genre of story. Ever wonder why we don't see as much Docbook around as we might? I mean, aside from its XML Hellscape? Whelp. Because a lot of the widgets in this "open standard" are tied to closed license tools. Take //revisionbar -> //fo:change-bar-begin. Go ahead and try to run that through Saxon. Yeah, that's right, the Official Opentopia DocBook FO gives you an element that can only get processed into PDF via vendor FO processors. And those vendors are NOT cheap. Crap like this fed the growth of web-based PDF engines like WeasyPrint, Vivliostyle, Paged.js, Prawn, and, on the paid side, Prince. Incidentally, making changebars with Asciidoctor and Paged is a frickin' snap, and you do it from git CLI instead of hand-coding every goddamn change bar. (But wait! You can hire yet another closed source tool to do a docbook diff that inserts the markup that can only be interpreted by another closed source tool! SIGN ME UP) We're not even going to touch the many, many, many XML specifications that ride on proprietary blobs in their own PIs - without which the XML is completely unparseable. Or dual mode validation with DTDs riding alongside schemas in delightfully undefined ways. Or . . or . . blabbity blabbity blah. Short version, whatever extra functionality was gained from XML publishing - and I'm not convinced there were any gains at all, even theoretical ones - was largely just not worth these sorts of traps. So today the whole ecosystem is today one that's largely based on government requirements and the starry-eyed consultants who love them. The rest of techcomm picked up lightweight markup or joined the Church of Madcap.

meindnoch 4y ago
I have no idea what half of those things are, but sounds like a pain in the ass.

DanielKehoe 4y ago

In 1991, I wanted to write about the WWW for NeXTWORLD magazine. Tim Berners-Lee replied to my email, saying he was reluctant to widely publicize that code for the web was available for free, as management at CERN had not yet agreed to release it publicly. The web grew slowly the first two years. At the time, I really didn't understand his hesitance, but in hindsight it was for the best. Two years ago, I wrote about the early days of the web on its 30th anniversary [0]. To me, Tim Berners-Lee is brilliant not just for his vision of a WorldWideWeb and its technical underpinnings, but also for an astute political streak in shepherding it to widespread adoption. I appreciate Jay Hoffmann (the article's author) for marking the significance of the anniversary. [0] https://danielkehoe.com/posts/early-days-of-the-web-1991/ https://danielkehoe.com/posts/early-days-of-the-web-1991/

WillAdams 4y ago
TBL's book _Weaving the Web_: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/821987 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/821987 seemed a really good overview/history to me and is one which I always recommend. He certainly earned his prominent rôle in the Y2K celebrations.
- cxr 4y ago
  > TBL's book _Weaving the Web_ Which, notably, is not made accessible via URL—at least not a "first-class" URL by the author/publisher; if you want to refer someone to the contents of a specific passage—or the entire book, even—then your best bet is with something like OpenLibrary, which has made it accessible in a fairly messy and roundabout way. Not a great endorsement for the vision of the Web as it was intended (vs how it is actually used).
  - WillAdams 4y ago
    Not sure what link you mean. https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Weaving/Overview.html https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Weaving/Overview.html seems fine to me. The book itself isn't on the web (although it was authored in a web page editor, Navipress) --- I don't think TBL has ever said that _all_ information/text would be on the Web so not understanding your point? Arguably that it's not is another nod to/acknowledgement of what Ted Nelson wanted to do w/ Xanadu but failed.

sylware 4y ago

But today, this is irrelevant as the "web" was stolen by blackrock and vanguard big tech companies. It was sneaky and malicious: A "web engine" became grotesquely and absurdely massive and complex, and that includes its SDK (yeah, a c++ compiler is even worse) and only very few can actually "work". Only google and apple provide "for free" web engines: blink and google financed geeko (firefox) from google, and webkit from apple. The only way to build those is with gcc (~MIT) or clang/llvm (~apple). And you call that digital freedom? Those are digital digital chains. The only way out is hardcore regulation with noscript/basic html browsers and simple but able to do good enough job protocols, and that stable in time (for instance irc if there is a text chat).

eru 4y ago
> [...] blackrock and vanguard big tech companies. What do you mean by that? Are you talking about index funds or something? > The only way out is hardcore regulation with noscript/basic html browsers and simple but able to do good enough job protocols, and that stable in time (for instance irc if there is a text chat). The cure sounds worse than the disease..
unethical_ban 4y ago
"Oh no, all this complete free and open source software exists but it's complex". Gemini exists, gopher exists, and it is completely possible to make websites with no JavaScript. You're demonizing Firefox and MIT and calling their output digital chains. It's fair to say that is a fringe opinion. Let's get angry that TCP is complicated, too. How many open source TCP stacks are there? And Ethernet! Only one cable standard. Who is behind it? Xerox!

somat 4y ago

The brilliant piece of the web, the bit that was revolutionary, the bit that most web alternatives not only fail to implement but appear to be fundamentally unable to implement, because let's face it, this is a terrible idea. is the idea that one web document can load any other web document. Hypercard is the common bogey man for a better web that failed, but in my mind the closest modern web alternative that failed to do this is the app store. now I know why the app model does not let you load arbitrary resources and you know why the app model does not let you load arbitrary resources, but in the right sort of light, if you squint the right way, you can see what may have been, how perhaps the exec() syscall may have taken an argument, a url, of what to exec.

vrglvrglvrgl 4y ago

[dead]

lmarcos 4y ago

AI should follow the same principle. It has the potential to become as widespread as the web... And yet here we are paying a fee per N tokens to use GPT.

eru 4y ago
Allowing suppliers to make money is a standard way to induce more supply.

sanjeevverma1 4y ago

amazing read! BUT the images are no longer rendering...

grishka 4y ago

> And it’s still not done. And that's a shame. This ever-expanding scope of the web is a curse. We need to draw the line somewhere and just stop.

gitgud 4y ago

> "Thirty years ago, Tim Berners-Lee and CERN gave the world a gift..." The only reason the decision seems important now, is if you think the internet could of never been developed without the all-powerful minds of "Tim Berners-Lee and CERN"... As computers got faster an nations and companies wanted to communicate between computers. It seems inevitable that the only way to communicate with computers is was a decentralised open and free network... If it wasn't CERN, someone else would have built the internet...

no_wizard 4y ago
Lets be glad it was someone with the foresight to imagine it as an open protocol from the beginning though. Interoperable and free to use things around it. The fact that they didn't try to monetize the underlying tech is almost a miracle.
ohitsdom 4y ago
Look at the current internet landscape- most users interact, find, and share content through the walled gardens of social networks. I don't think "decentralized open and free" networks are at all inevitable. To me those characteristics are shrinking, not growing.

alasdairking 4y ago

Nah. Adding the IMG tag. Without that, it is text only, and destined for limited uptake like Prestel or CEEFAX.

marbu 4y ago
Img tag was important, but it doesn't mean that web was text only before the tag was introduced: people were linking to pictures in the same way how would one link to any other resource, and when you opened the link, the picture was shown in a new window.

marbu 4y ago

In How the Web was Born[1] I red that Tim also considered GPL at some point as he liked the FSF's approach, but as the OP notes in the post, he decided to go with public domain so that it would not scare off some companies from using libwww code. See also: https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web/licensing-web https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web/licensing-web [1] https://books.google.cz/books/about/How_the_Web_was_Born.html?id=pIH-JijUNS0C&redir_esc=y https://books.google.cz/books/about/How_the_Web_was_Born.htm...

marbu 4y ago
The whole early period of web development is quite interesting. The decision about the licensing was not the only crucial decision which made it succeed, like release of libwww, focus on super simple browser which works on any platform (line mode) or introduction of gateways ... Recently I wrote a blog post about it focusing on design of first browsers and forces which were driving it. https://blog.marbu.eu/posts/2023-04-29-the-first-web-browser/ https://blog.marbu.eu/posts/2023-04-29-the-first-web-browser... Btw early users of the web mostly didn't know about the original Tim's vision and the 1st web gui browser/editor prototype. See for example hn comment from someone who was using original line mode browser under a post about the first browser/editor: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34218748 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34218748