It's interesting to read the first link, but with DNS in mind instead of gopher. All the resource arguments still apply, and indeed DNS is not free, but equally also not expensive.
Now granted, DNS has a scarcity component, and if it was free it would basically be consumed by bots and be useless.
So back to Gopher. Which was going to license the server software (? - it's unclear, but appears to be targeting the server), and is that not the business model Netscape adopted?
Which was then subsumed by Apache and IIS?
So I guess I'm somewhat confused as to the actual benefit of the CERN "release" - (allowing others to create servers and clients?) - although clearly it may have been instrumental in gaining mindshare.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (December 15, 1994) -- Netscape Communications Corporation today announced the availability of the 1.0 versions of its Netscape Navigatorand Netsite server line, including the Netsite Commerce Serverwith integrated security. The availability of these open software products, announced in September, enables Netscape Communications to offer the first complete, secure client/server software system for conducting commerce and exchanging information via the Internet and private TCP/IP networks.
According to The Web Server Book, at the second International WWW Conference, held in Chicago in October 1994, a straw poll of attendees showed that “90 percent of present Webmasters used the NCSA server”
Netscape's original business model was selling Navigator.
That didn't work for various reasons, like IE being given away for free. So then they switched to server side products. But there wasn't enough depth there, and there were also free web servers, so they couldn't create enough value to both pay for server development and the browser, so they went under.
Then MS came along. The browser was undermining their paid-for product, not generating revenue. So IE "went under" (was destaffed).
Then AOL came along. For unclear reasons they bought Mozilla and paid for development for a long time, probably losing all their money. They eventually went under.
Then Apple came along. They needed a browser of their own because they didn't want to depend on IE any more. But beyond being able to browse the mobile web they didn't need much more than that. Apple has not gone under, but the web is clearly just a feature of their OS and to the extent it gets developed, it's to keep up with Chrome.
Then Google came along. They saw what a disaster zone the browser market was, plagued by non-existent or directly contradictory business models, and they feared Microsoft crushing them above all else, just like they'd done for Netscape. So they started paying browser makers to set them as the default, and wrote the Toolbar, and eventually graduated to making their own browser from scratch. AdWords is the closest thing the web ever had to an actual business model.
It's reasonable that the people funding Gopher didn't see any commercial future in it, especially as Gopher had search integrated into the protocol. Even Google tried to sell themselves to Yahoo for $1M early on, and were rebuffed, because clearly web stuff wasn't worth that much.
Now granted, DNS has a scarcity component, and if it was free it would basically be consumed by bots and be useless.
So back to Gopher. Which was going to license the server software (? - it's unclear, but appears to be targeting the server), and is that not the business model Netscape adopted?
Which was then subsumed by Apache and IIS?
So I guess I'm somewhat confused as to the actual benefit of the CERN "release" - (allowing others to create servers and clients?) - although clearly it may have been instrumental in gaining mindshare.