Source: Original from John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, modified by Techrights
Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web to help him, a CERN researcher, share his physics papers. I can relate to that personally. He and I were both inspired by Richard Stallman, who had led a movement a decade earlier, advocating free sharing (free of restrictions, not related to cost or business models). It was not about monetary gain and Berners-Lee antagonised patents all along [1, 2, 3]. Sadly, however, the W3C shares none of those same interests and principles. Recently, it got as bad as DRM advocacy (owing/due to Microsoft and a buddy), which is not shocking given who runs the W3C. I exchanged some words with Berners-Lee about patents. His views contradict those of the increasingly corporations-run W3C, e.g. on patents (the W3C CEO is a software patents proponent and the man behind the Microsoft/Novell patent deal).
"A few decades ago Tim Berners-Lee followed the example of Richard Stallman and now it is Richard Stallman's group which chastises Berners-Lee's. "Here is the latest protest against the W3C's action on DRM and further coverage of the original announcement in some FOSS-oriented news sites. For the W3C to facilitate DRM is like facilitating TiVoisation in GPLv2 or Linux and 'secure' boot in UEFI. It leads to bad practices that harm a lot of people.
A few decades ago Tim Berners-Lee followed the example of Richard Stallman and now it is Richard Stallman's group which chastises Berners-Lee's. There is something to be learned from all this. Berners-Lee should have power over the group (W3C) he created, it should not be the other way around. ⬆