Walter Isaacson Quote
Be rich? As Cailliau recalled, his initial reaction was Well, it helps, no?27 That was the incorrect response. He apparently didn’t care about that, Cailliau realized. Tim’s not in it for the money. He accepts a much wider range of hotel-room facilities than a CEO would.28 Instead Berners-Lee insisted that the Web protocols should be made available freely, shared openly, and put forever in the public domain. After all, the whole point of the Web, and the essence of its design, was to promote sharing and collaboration. CERN issued a document declaring that it relinquishes all intellectual property rights to this code, both source and binary form, and permission is granted for anyone to use, duplicate, modify, and redistribute it.29 Eventually CERN joined forces with Richard Stallman and adopted his GNU General Public License. The result was one of the grandest free and open-source projects in history. That approach reflected Berners-Lee’s self-effacing style. He was averse to
Be rich? As Cailliau recalled, his initial reaction was Well, it helps, no?27 That was the incorrect response. He apparently didn’t care about that, Cailliau realized. Tim’s not in it for the money. He accepts a much wider range of hotel-room facilities than a CEO would.28 Instead Berners-Lee insisted that the Web protocols should be made available freely, shared openly, and put forever in the public domain. After all, the whole point of the Web, and the essence of its design, was to promote sharing and collaboration. CERN issued a document declaring that it relinquishes all intellectual property rights to this code, both source and binary form, and permission is granted for anyone to use, duplicate, modify, and redistribute it.29 Eventually CERN joined forces with Richard Stallman and adopted his GNU General Public License. The result was one of the grandest free and open-source projects in history. That approach reflected Berners-Lee’s self-effacing style. He was averse to
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About Walter Isaacson
He has been the president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan policy studies organization based in Washington, D.C., the chair and CEO of CNN, and the editor of Time.
Isaacson attended Harvard University and Pembroke College, Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. He is the co-author with Evan Thomas of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (1986) and the author of Pro and Con (1983), Kissinger: A Biography (1992), Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (2003), Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007), American Sketches (2009), Steve Jobs (2011), The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (2014), Leonardo da Vinci (2017), The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race (2021) and Elon Musk (2023).
Isaacson is an advisory partner at Perella Weinberg Partners, a New York City-based financial services firm. He was vice chair of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, which oversaw the rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina, chaired the government board that runs Voice of America, and was a member of the Defense Innovation Board.