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I'm not so sure that Facebook is the best example. It's not clear whether its existence has made a positive mark on the world or a negative one.

Also, Linux was created in another socialized state, Finland. I would argue that the impact of Linux is at least an order of magnitude more profound than Facebook.



Another example, Tim Berners-Lee and the WWW.


WWW is actually 3 things: URL/URI + HTTP + HTML ;) Created based on the preceding ideas like Gopher, telnet, etc and some others as well

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_%28protocol%29

"On 30 April 1993, CERN announced that the World Wide Web would be free to anyone, with no fees due.[24] Coming two months after the announcement that the server implementation of the Gopher protocol was no longer free to use, this produced a rapid shift away from Gopher and towards the Web. "

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web

Btw, I'm not disagreeing with you, the European idea of making things for "everybody" got into play there.


Nor am I disagreeing. Only pointing out that Linux was also created based on preceding ideas like Unix, MINIX, etc., themselves based on even earlier ideas ... just like HTML comes out of SGML, and has its own long history.


Well, Linux started with Minix, and of course, after its (initial) creation it had a lot of input from everywhere.

I agree it's a more "European" model of development, sure.


>Well, Linux started with Minix

which Andrew Tanenbaum created at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam.




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