None of them caught people's imagination. The very existence of the Free Software Movement is part of the Internet saga, because free software would not exist without the net. The Free Software Movement has offered what would be unimaginable when the Internet was formed - games, editors, windowing systems, compilers, networking software, and even entire operating systems available for anyone who wants them, without licensing fees, with complete source code, and all you need is Internet access. It also offers challenges, forcing us to ask what changes are needed in our society to support these new freedoms that have touched so many people. And it offers chances at exploitation, from the businesses using free software development platforms for commercial code, to the Internet Worm and the security risks of open systems.
People wonder whether progress is better served through government funding or private industry.
Both business and government tried to build large data communication networks in the 1980s. Our reward has been its commercialization. For the next few years, the Internet will almost certainly be content-driven. Although new protocols are always under development, we have barely begun to explore the potential of just the existing ones. Chief among these is the World Wide Web, with its potential for simple on-line access to almost any information imaginable.