Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality: Scientific American

<http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=long-live-the-web>

I love Tim Berners-Lee. He invented the World Wide Web. What an amazing
claim to fame. He's totally brilliant too. In this article he outlines
the vision of the web and how he wants it to continue. I really hope the
industry listens.

He's an idealist and a visionary. Now the web in monetised and his
complaints are the complaints everyone has. It's always profit-based
shite that makes for poor usability, experience and hassle for users.

The open source movement continues to be the bastion of idealism. It's
being heralded by Google which is great whereas Apple and Microsoft (and
others) still favour closed code and high profit models based on
revenue. Google is, I hope, the future. Apple and Microsoft can suck on
my chocolate salty balls. The whole patent wars thing really pisses me
off. It just gets in the way of progress and makes lawyers rich. Any
company that can afford a world wide patent gets lots of them to secure
the technology and make people pay lots of money to use it. Often the
ideas are come up with by employees who never see a fraction of the
profits made from patents. Of course neither do those in the open source
movement. They give their time freely.

Like anything great the web was made by idealists and visionaries. Had
the US military had their way no one but them would have access to the
empowering technology of interconnection of computers and networks. It's
idealists and visionaries like Nicholas Negropronte who come up with the
One Laptop Per Child project only to have the ideas stolen by the
manufacturers of netbooks and other devices as well as the manufacturers
each vying for their share of the project for their benefit rather than
the greater good.

These individuals are the knights of the modern age fighting the tyranny
of evil, the tyranny of copyright and profit, of ideas and technologies
kept secret or used for profit over advancement of the human race, of
selfishness over selflessness. The latter is perhaps the great war of
the modern age as it's been for the entirety of human civilisation. The
change to selflessness may, in itself, be the most significant measure
of human advancement.

But perhaps that's just my stupid bias to believe that advancement is
about selflessness and equality rather than promotion of the ideal that
might is right. I like my bias though.