Vinton Cerf will step down from his role as Google’s chief internet evangelist next week, marking the conclusion of one of the most influential careers in technology history.

While speaking via video feed at the Open Frontier conference hosted by the Laude Institute, Cerf was recognized by Dave Patterson, the UC Berkeley professor best known for co-developing RISC processor architecture.

“Vint…has been at Google more than 20 years, and he is retiring a week from today, and so I think we ought to give him a round of applause for a relatively good career,” Patterson said, to cheers from the room.

Cerf, 83, and collaborator Robert Kahn are credited as the architects of the networking protocols that became the internet we know it today. His work developing and popularizing TCP/IP — the basic set of rules that lets different computer networks talk to each other — beginning in the 1970s has been recognized with numerous honorary degrees, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a Turing Award, among other honors.

Since 2005, Cerf has served as a vice president and chief internet evangelist at Google. (At this point, we can safely say the internet is fully evangelized, for good or ill.)

Cerf was speaking on a panel alongside other computer scientists known for their work on durable open source projects, including Patterson; François Chollet, creator of the Keras deep-learning library and co-founder of Ndea; John Ousterhout, the Stanford computer scientist behind the Tcl programming language, who also co-founded Electric Cloud; and Matei Zaharia, who is Databricks’ co-founder and chief technologist. They offered advice about what it takes to build open source systems that survive — advice that’s increasingly relevant as founders bet on open infrastructure for the next wave of AI products.