Berners-Lee Launches New W3 Foundation

robertsonadams tips us to the initiation of the World Wide Web Foundation with $5M of seed funding from the Knight Foundation. From the announcement: "Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, unveils the World Wide Web Foundation. It aims to advance One Web that is free and open, to expand its capability and robustness, and to extend its benefits to all people on the planet." The new foundation's site should have video up soon of Berners-Lee's speech at the kickoff event. The foundation hopes to raise $50M–$100M and will issue grants in Web science, technology and practice, and Web for society. Initial plans will be disclosed early next year.

Comments

Job for the foundation: fight UN traceback

[Morgaine]

I suggest that Tim uses his influence and backing from the new foundation to fight this latest China-inspired UN move to provide IP traceback and lose anonymity across the net.

His WWW would never have blossomed the way it did under such Big Brother conditions, and we'd all be a lot poorer for it. The control freaks just don't understand the benefit of emergent systems, and that freedom has a price. Sure, we suffer a few annoyances and some real crimes, but it's still infinitely better than everybody living in a police state.

Re:"Inventor" should be quoted

[NickFortune]

His contribution was, no doubt, huge, but the inventor he was not -- considering the existence of all the prior works, including Gopher, there was nothing in his work, that was not "obvious to someone skilled in the art".

Umm... your wikipedia link points at an entry in the talk page for Sir Tim's wikipedia entry. It cheerfully conflates Internet and Web in order to try and make a case. There are some fairly robust rebuttals there as well.

Citing such poor quality references weakens your argument rather than strengthening it.