In February 1993, the University of Minnesota announced that it would charge licensing fees for the use of its implementation of the Gopher server.[11][9] Users became concerned that fees might also be charged for independent implementations.[12][13] Gopher expansion stagnated, to the advantage of the World Wide Web, to which CERN disclaimed ownership.[14] In September 2000, the University of Minnesota re-licensed its Gopher software under the GNU General Public License.[15]
It’s probably not quite right to call it an open source alternative, though. I don’t think that gopher or anything was established in a monopolistic way, but that was before my time. Besides, the internet was all universities back then.
It’s true that Gopher never really went anywhere. It was convenient for what it was and it had Veronica (a basic search engine) which made it useful. But hyperlinks were a killer feature.
Gopher wasn’t open source? There were linux clients.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)#Decline
It’s probably not quite right to call it an open source alternative, though. I don’t think that gopher or anything was established in a monopolistic way, but that was before my time. Besides, the internet was all universities back then.
It’s true that Gopher never really went anywhere. It was convenient for what it was and it had Veronica (a basic search engine) which made it useful. But hyperlinks were a killer feature.
Berners-Lee didn’t come up with that idea, though, did he? I thought he got the idea from Ted Nelson’s Project Xanadu.