[ih] Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...)

[Craig Partridge]

An observation that may be useful.

Having worked with university intellectual property folks...  They live in
fear of letting an outstanding result get out the door and then being
castigated for not monetizing it properly.   Far more than they fear
killing innovation because they sought to monetize it.  They all point to
the rare unicorn patent: RSA for MIT or mRNA for UPENN.  And this leads to
all sorts of harm to actually transitioning most good ideas.

Craig


On Tue, Apr 28, 2026 at 11:30 AM John Levine via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> It appears that John Gilmore via Internet-history <gnu at toad.com> said:
> >DARPA got exactly what they wanted from their contract with Berkeley --
> >broad, rapid adoption of TCP/IP in their research community.  That would
> >not have happened if they had paid the same amount but had asked
> >Berkeley to license the results through a proprietary company.
>
> Gopher was (is?) a similar cautionary tale. It was a good design and
> although it was a lot less flexible than the web, it was also a lot
> easier to implement and loaded the servers less. In the 1993 first
> edition of Internet for Dummies, Gopher and the Web each got a chapter
> of about the same length.
>
> Then U of Minnesota decided that they would charge a licensning fee
> for their Gopher server, and that was it. It disappeared while the Web
> became, well, the Web.
>


-- 
*****
Craig Partridge's email account for professional society activities and
mailing lists.