A miracle called WEB wouldn't have been real If protocols were not open sourced

Some say that connecting the dots may lead to an invention. What if someone claimed ownership of that invention and made it proprietary for the use of select few and self only. That would have been unfair.

Thankfully that didn't happen. We are talking about an invention which for good of humanity was made available to all of the humans regardless of what cast, creed, race, religion, gender or ethnicity we belong.

Yes.. the " www - World Wide Web"

We all know that fact that Tim Berners-Lee played a path-breaking role in the area of world wide web. We the downline generations can't thank enough for giving us the technology that made us smart and lazy at the same time.

Being born in the family of mathematicians, Sir Tim got himself indulged in computers in the very beginning of this technology revolution and understood the core of how it all works. He played around with microprocessors, programmed in hexadecimal, did a lot of consulting for hardware and software, took printers and made them smarter by integrating communication protocols in them, wrote operating systems and all kind of cool stuff back then.

By the time Time got into CERN he had to go through a lot of documentation systems which made him frustrated. There were lots of people coming with all sort of computers with them, they had all sort of data formats. In all that diversity if one wanted to figure out how to build something, it required learning about the new machine, new program data format and establish the compatibility. It just got very frustrating and an idea of web sparked. He designed it mainly because he needed it and it didn't exist back in the old days. Tim strongly believes that programming computer is really really creative work.

Tim connected the dots, reframed the way we use information and designed the protocol for world wide web which we call "The Internet". In one of his talk, he beautifully answers why does the web works?

It works because people follow links, people can follow links only when people make links, then why do people make links? People make links because they want their page to be a better quality page, you want better quality page because you want many people to visit your page and read it, hence opening various channels for revenue.

The psychology of people wanting to be read. It makes a link to other good things which together forms this huge mass of critical review which is how the web works. Search engines use this mass of critical review put-in by human beings.

In 1989 while working at CERN Tim proposed a global hypertext project called world wide web. It didn't get quite a buzz right away, but about 18 months later he got an approval to go ahead and do it in a sort of side play project. His boss called it "Vague but interesting" and over the next few years he also garnered help from Robert Cailliau and other CERN researchers, the proposal later spawned the Hypertext Transfer protocol - HTTP the basis for world wide web as we study today.

The idea of Hypertext was applied to the transfer control protocol (TCP) and domain naming server (DNS). Sir Tim coded the first www server "httpd" and the first client "World wide web" a WYSIWYG hypertext browser and editor which ran in NeXTStep environment. It was internally made available within CERN in the summer of 1991.

For another couple more years Sir Tim juggled through and mastered technologies on the web design and coordinating feedback from early users, Initiated specifications for URLs, HTTP and HTML.

Sir Tim founded the World Wide Web Consortium in the year 1994, Since then he has served as the director of W3C ( world wide web consortium ) a web standards organization that develops interoperable technologies to lead the web to where we see it today.

Sir Tim coded the first serving software and web browser and made it available for free (open source) which provided a strong momentum for further development of web and it's widespread adoption while enabling the community to use and refine the technology. The open source software model is a decentralized way of software development model which encourages openness, transparency, and healthy collaboration.

we've witnessed a small project created out of frustration evolve into a basic right for humans. Sir Tim Berners-Lee is a genius, a genius who was indeed at the right place and the right time to unify the scattered pieces into the web.

The "What If ?" question.

Let's go back in the history and for the sake of argument assume it all never happened, Internet didn't happen or maybe Sir Tim changed the course of his decisions and instead kept his ideas for proprietary use.

Firstly if the web was proprietary, only the rich would get richer and powerful ones would have exploited the technology for personal gains. If at all the protocols that laid the foundation of the web were not open source, we wouldn't have had Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others in this space.

Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee has written many books about the web and internet. He has earned more than 15 prestigious awards for his contribution to humanity and also named one of Time magazine's "100 Most Important People of the 20th Century". He is also the founding member of Web Science Trust (WST) launched in 2009 to enable research in web science, a multidisciplinary study of humanity connected by technology. He is also a professor in the department of electronics and computer science at the University of Southampton, UK. Sir Tim advocates on Net neutrality and strives to keep the web open. In the recent, Sir Tim expressed major concerns about some large organizations and few countries trying to control the net and suppress free speech or violate user privacy, he has hit our hard at lawmakers for rolling back internet privacy laws in the US. He said that the politicians' attitude towards internet was "really appalling" it leads to users being vulnerable and in danger.
Sir Tim continues to enlighten us all in the areas of web and related technologies.