Thirty years ago, on April 30, 1993, a groundbreaking announcement was made by CERN that would irrevocably transform our world. Walter Hoogland and Helmut Weber, who held the positions of Director of Research and Director of Administration at CERN, respectively, released to the public a revolutionary tool initially proposed by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. This tool was designed to enable scientists and institutions globally to exchange information efficiently and accurately while working on CERN data. The significance of this decision was not entirely clear at the time, but it would ultimately change the world as we know it.

The World Wide Web, released by CERN on that fateful day, has since become an indispensable aspect of daily life. The International Telecommunications Union reports that more than 5 billion people—two-thirds of the world’s population—rely on the Internet regularly for various purposes, including research, industry, communication, and entertainment.

Walter Hoogland, who co-signed the document announcing the Web’s release, reflects on the decision: “Most people would agree that the public release was the best thing we could have done, and that it was the source of the success of the World Wide Web, apart from, of course, the World Wide Web itself!”

At the time of the release, the World Wide Web was made available through an internal document signed by Hoogland and Weber, addressed “to whom it may concern.” In 1993, copyright licensing standards were just beginning to emerge. The document stated that “CERN relinquishes all intellectual property rights to this code, both source and binary form, and permission is granted for anyone to use, duplicate, modify and redistribute it.”

As the concept of open source evolved, the subsequent version of the software, released in 1994, was issued under an open-source license instead of a public domain release. This allowed CERN to retain the copyright while granting anyone the freedom to use and modify the Web as they saw fit. For more information about the licensing of the Web, you can visit this link.

The decision to release the World Wide Web to the public arguably enabled it to expand into the behemoth it is today. By making it freely accessible to all, CERN demonstrated its commitment to open collaboration for the betterment of society. This spirit is now enshrined in CERN’s Open Science Policy, which continues to foster a culture of openness and sharing within the Laboratory.

Dig deeper: To learn more about the origins of the Web at CERN, visit the dedicated Web@30 website or see this resource on the birth of the Web. If you’re interested in insights from one of the co-signatories of the Web’s founding document, you can watch the full interview with Walter Hoogland.