I’ve twice now made reference to the time I was told by the current head of CERN that at one point they tried to put the World Wide Web concept up for sale only to discover that there were no buyers. Aaron Swartz asked Tim Berners-Lee about this and he says that’s not what happened:
No, they did not try to sell it it as far as I am aware. There was a certain amount of agonizing that CERN didn’t really have a story about what to do about spinning out technology. There were some arguing that the IPR should be kept by CERN, but no real plans as to what to do with it. Hey, if they had been MIT they might have encouraged me to spin it out as a startup, with the help of some experienced people who had done it before, and well, maybe the world would have just waited 17 years as it did for RSA. I am sure in fact a bunch of competing systems would have ended up without a single interoperable space.
Don’t want to be in the position of spreading wild rumors, so I thought y’all should know.
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