A Short History of Code on the Net

In the beginning, of course, there were very few applications on the Net. The Net was no more than a protocol for exchanging data, and the original programs simply took advantage of this protocol. The file transfer protocol (FTP) was born early in the Net’s history;¹ the electronic message protocol (SMTP) was born soon after. It was not long before a protocol to display directories in a graphical way (Gopher) was developed. And in 1991 the most famous of protocols—the hyper text transfer protocol (HTTP) and hyper text markup language (HTML)—gave birth to the World Wide Web.

Each protocol spawned many applications. Since no one had a monopoly on the protocol, no one had a monopoly on its implementation. There were many FTP applications and many e-mail servers. There were even a large number of browsers.² The protocols were open standards, gaining their blessing from the standards bodies such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and W3C. Once a protocol was specified, programmers could build programs that utilized it.

Much of the software implementing these protocols was “open,” at least initially—that is, the source code for the software was available along with the object code.* This openness was responsible for much of the early Net’s growth. Others could explore how a program was implemented and learn from that example how better to implement the protocol in the future.

The World Wide Web is the best example of this point. Again, the code that makes a web page appear as it does is called the hyper text markup language, or HTML.†With HTML, you can specify how a web page will appear, and to what it will be linked.

The original HTML was proposed in 1991 by the CERN researcher Tim Berners-Lee.³ It was designed to make it easy to link documents at a research facility, but it quickly became obvious that documents on any machine on the Internet could be linked. Berners-Lee and Cailliau made both HTML and its companion HTTP freely available for anyone to take.

And take them people did, at first slowly, but then at an extraordinary rate. People started building web pages and linking them to others. HTML became one of the fastest-growing computer languages in the history of computing.

Why? One important reason was that HTML was always “open.” Even today, on most browsers in distribution, you can always reveal the “source” of a web page and see what makes it tick. The source remains open: you can download it, copy it, and improve it as you wish. Copyright law may protect the source code of a web page, but in reality it protects it very imperfectly. HTML became as popular as it did primarily because it was so easy to copy. Anyone, at any time, could look under the hood of an HTML document and learn how the author produced it. 

Openness—not property or contract but free code and access—created the boom that gave birth to the Internet that we now know. And it was this boom that then attracted the attention of commerce. With all this activity, commerce rightly reasoned, surely there was money to be made.

Historically the commercial model for producing software has been different.⁴ Though the history began even as the open code movement continued, commercial software vendors were not about to produce “free” (as in open source) software. Commercial vendors produced software that was closed—that traveled without its source and was protected against modification both by the law and by its own code.

By the second half of the 1990s—marked most famously by Microsoft’s Windows 95, which came bundled Internet-savvy—commercial software vendors began producing “application space” code. This code was increasingly connected to the Net—it increasingly became code “on” the Internet—but for the most part it remained closed.⁵ And as we prepare to weather Y2K, most of the most significant software on the market is closed code that has nonetheless found a way to connect to the Net.  [THE EXAMPLES HERE ARE NOW DATED, THE Y2K REFERENCE MORESO THAN THE WINDOWS 95 COMMENT.  THE REAL QUESTION FOR THIS AND THE NEXT PARAGRAPH IS, "WHERE IS CODE GOING NOW?"  EVEN THE "APPLICATION SPACE" CODE THAT IS OPEN SUCH AS LINUX OR FIREFOX IS INTERACTING WITH MORE AND MORE TRUE INTERNET APPLICATION CODE THAT ISN'T AVAILABLE UNDER "VIEW SOURCE" LIKE HTML IS. WEB BASED E-MAIL PROGRAMS, WEB MAPS, FLASH BASED WEBPAGES/GAMES, .NET/MONO, WHERE ARE THESE APPLICATION AND METHODS OF SOFTWARE DELIVERY TAKING US IN THE NEXT DECADE?]

It is this balance that we need to track—the balance between open and closed code on the Net. Most of the application space that ordinary users now use is closed. There are many exceptions: Apache, still the number-one server on the Internet whether users realize it or not, and SENDMAIL, still the most widely used program for forwarding mail, are both open code. But if we include within the application space the operating systems that connect to the Net, application space code on the Net is closed.

Footnotes

¹ See Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay up Late, 174. Edit Delete

² A 1994 HTML manual lists twenty-nine different browsers; see Larry Aronson, HTML Manual of Style (Emeryville, Calif.: Ziff-Davis Press, 1994), 124–26. Edit Delete

³ See Ibid., 4. Edit Delete

⁴ Of course, not always. When commercial production of computers began, software was often a free addition to the computer. Its commercial development as proprietary came only later; see Ira V. Heffan, “Copyleft: Licensing Collaborative Works in the Digital Age,” Stanford Law Review 49 (1997): 1487, 1492–93. Edit Delete

⁵ Netscape’s Communicator is an exception. As I explained, in 1998, the company gave the source code for the product (minus some encryption modules) to Mozilla, which would continue the development of Mozilla as part of the open source movement; see “Mozilla Public License Version 1.1,” available at http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/MPL-1.1.html (visited March 24, 2005).  See the discussion in Robert W. Gomulkiewicz, “The License Is the Product: Comments on the Promise of Article 2B for Software and Information Licensing,” Berkeley Technology Law Journal 13 (1998): 891, 924. Edit Delete