In 1989, an employee at CERN made a decision that would change the world. Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist working at the intergovernmental organization, had developed a system that would allow scientists to quickly share information via hypertext that linked documents across a network. This system was the blueprint for what would become the World Wide Web – the global information system that makes up the modern internet. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

Berners-Lee understood the value of the system he’d developed and so he made it available to everyone, free of patents or royalties. This is not the only time a world-changing invention has been made freely available to the public. For instance, the three-

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