Linux and growth of Internet

On Thu, 13 Jan 2005, Gavin Thomas Nicol wrote: But the precursor to all of that was the fact that it stopped being government funded; only non-commercial uses were allowed. (In 1992, you had to have some awareness of what was allowed; .com could use .edu (as an example) network resources IFF it was directly related to .edu work; .com could do anything with .com, and .edu anything with .edu. The .edu::.com relationship was what required finesse. By removing all gov't money sources and releasing from contracts etc it was commercializable. A few were there from the start and knew it, Alternet/UUnet, PSI, and others. A few, like Stanford's BARRnet, had no clue of their own and resisted it when he tripped over it. It's also simply *NOT TRUE* that industry created the internet, like many of them fabricate; it was quite well developed loooong before business got there. As aDARPA project, funded off to one side, it was allowed to develop technically and, it turns out critically, culturally. My friend Paulina Borsook wrote about this in her excellent but bit-the-hand-that-fed book CYBERSELFISH. Industry doesn't like social or cultural critique, turns out. (I'm just being an asshole, Paulina knew precisely what she was doing.)