To see why the Internet and open source are a good fit for each other, we first have to look at the origins of the Internet as we know it today. Before the mainstream explosion of the web in the 1990s, the Internet was still very much the domain of universities, colleges, laboratories, and governments. It was still mainly under research, which gives us our first clue because the scientific community has long valued the open cooperation of its members. Initially, all software was open source simply because nobody had the idea of charging money for it.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, widely recognized as the father of the World Wide Web (before this, there was just “internet”), created the first web server while working at CERN running his HTTP protocol. His system was NeXTStep – a derivative of Unix and the BSD operating system. The web browser which first popularized the World Wide Web was Mosaic by NCSA, built on a Unix system and released as open source.
So there was open source and Unix at the very beginning. Both of the major web browsers in use today, Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox can trace their roots directly back to the Mosaic web browser. Read More