@bob @GrooveStomp The reason gopher failed was due to lack of flexibility. In less than two weeks we went from 90% gopher traffic to 5% gopher, vs 5% www to 90% www. The other 5% was ftp. This happened at precisely the time that mosaic introduced inline images - which gopher simply couldn't compete with and couldn't provide a workable mechanism to implement. The licensing stuff was a sideshow - the University of Minnesota saw dollar signs and wanted a piece of that pie; but most of the community had already forked long before that threat became tangible.