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

Inventors

[pak9rabid]

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web...

Sounds like him and Al Gore have something in common

Re:"Inventor" should be quoted

[mi]

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

My intention was to show, that I'm not alone in my opinion. The follow-up counter-arguments aren't robust at all, in my opinion, and are broken apart easily. For example, Gopher is, clearly, the "prior art", and so are other, even earlier systems.

The main point is, if Tim were to file a patent based on the claims made on his behalf, and try to enforce it to, say, collect royalties, the entire "community" would've been up in arms. As he is being a "nice guy" about it (and, according to others, he really is a nice guy), people are willing to grant him the crown, that is neither his, nor claimed by him. His personal attitude is not supposed to matter, but it clearly does.

And then, of course, is the fact, that he was not an American, while doing some of this inventing at CERN (although most of his work was done and continues today in Massachusetts). This is gleefully trumpeted by anti-Americans (in the US and abroad) jealous of our claim to having invented the Internet.