A very interresting set of radio show on BBC about the creation of CERN; CERN happens to be also the place where World Wide Web has been invented, incidentally when one of the laboratory needed to access informations dispatched on many different computers - from then Gopher quickly got replaced. History will ever remember Sir Tim Berners Lee. It quickly has been legally declared Public Domain - CERN could then not claim ownership but nobody else either.
There’s a very nice part of it which summarize quite perfectly the generosity behind the open source, and its root one can still find in the Science community.
I quite love this quote: Francis Farley
This [the Internet] usefull thing was a totally unexpected byproduct; you cannot plan the usefull part of science. What you can only do is to support the right guys let them do what they think is important - and out of that will come usefull applications
* thanks to Dodeckahedron for pointing out to me that today (10th september 2008) was the frist beam at CERN.
** picture: The Globe of Innovation in the morning. The wooden globe is a structure originally built for Switzerland’s national exhibition, Expo’02, and is 40 meters wide, 27 meters tall. (Maximilien Brice; Claudia Marcelloni, © CERN) via BostonGlobe.
