Gopher (protocol) - Stagnation

Stagnation

The World Wide Web was in its infancy in 1991, and Gopher services quickly became established. By the late 1990s, Gopher had largely ceased expanding. Several factors contributed to Gopher's stagnation:

• In February 1993, the University of Minnesota announced that it would charge licensing fees for the use of its implementation of the Gopher server. As a consequence of this, some users were concerned that a licensing fee would also be charged for independent implementations. Users were scared away from Gopher technology, to the advantage of the Web, which CERN disclaimed ownership of. In September 2000, the University of Minnesota re-licensed its Gopher software under the GNU GPL.
• Gopher client functionality was quickly duplicated by early Web browsers, such as Mosaic, which subsumed the protocol as part of their functions.
• Gopher has a more rigid structure compared to the free-form HTML of the Web. With Gopher, every document has a defined format and type, and the typical user navigates through a single server-defined menu system to get to a particular document. This can be quite different from the way a typical user might traverse documents on the Web.

Gopher remains in active use by its enthusiasts, and there have been attempts to revive the use of Gopher on modern platforms and mobile devices. One such attempt is The Overbite Project, which hosts various browser extensions and modern clients.

As of 2012, there are approximately 160 gopher servers indexed by Veronica-2, reflecting a slow growth from 2007 when there were fewer than 100, although many are infrequently updated. Within these servers Veronica indexed approximately 2.5 million unique selectors. A handful of new servers are set up every year by hobbyists – over 50 have been set up and added to Floodgap's list since 1999. A snapshot of Gopherspace as it was in 2007 was circulated on BitTorrent and is still available. Due to the simplicity of the Gopher protocol, setting up new servers or adding Gopher support to browsers is often done in a tongue in cheek manner, principally on April Fools' Day.