The creator of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, is auctioning off its original source code as a non-fungible token (NFT) next week according to CNBC.
The London-born computer scientist invented the World Wide Web in 1989, and built the first web browser and web server in 1990. In March, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey sold his first ever tweet, which reads “just setting up my twttr”, for US$2.9 million.
In spite of being the inventor of the Web, Berners-Lee has not “cashed-in” on his creation, and the web remains open to all. In fact, the European research organization CERN, which Berners-Lee worked at during the Web’s creation, relinquished all of its rights to the software in 1993, putting its three components into the Public Domain.
“Had the technology been proprietary, and in my total control, it would probably not have taken off. The decision to make the Web an open system was necessary for it to be universal. You can’t propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it,” said Berners-Lee in an online post .
According to the Guardian , the proceeds from the sale of Berners-Lee’s NFT will benefit initiatives that he and his wife Rosemary Leith — a Canadian who co-founded the World Wide Web Foundation with the British inventor — support.
“It has been fun to go back and look over the code. It is amazing to see the things that those relatively few lines of code, with a help of an amazing growing gang of collaborators across the planet, stayed enough on track to become what the web is now,” wrote Berners-Lee in the letter included in the NFT.
“I have never once felt I could relax and sit back — as the web was and is constantly changing. It is not yet the best it can be: there is always work to be done!” he added.
The computer scientist’s NFT will go on sale on June 23 until June 30, with bids starting at US$1,000.
