How important is it that the knowledge on the web is free?
Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web one day at CERN, the big particle accelerator in Switzerland, where there were lots of different scientists who had lots of different “platforms”, or different styles of computer with operating systems that refused to talk to each other. So he developed this language, HTML, hypertext markup language, which was able to write pages and have hotlinks across to other pages using the HTTP protocol, hypertext transfer protocol. But the point is Tim Berners-Lee thought it should be free. He didn't take any money for it. He would have been the richest man the world had ever seen if he'd taken even the tiniest amount. But for him it was important that it was free, in the spirit of the Internet as then was, a place for commonality, rather like science generally. Science knowledge should be free, and most good scientists hate the idea of patenting the DNA of a tree, or patenting some process in medicine or any other form of science. Knowledge should be free, that's how man learns, it's how we all develop. And I think for the new generation of web users, as it were, Web 2.0 as it likes to call itself, or the user generated content side of it, people should be aware when they write things or produce things or offer things to the web of those principles that Tim Berners-Lee espoused, that of freedom of sharing. Sharing knowledge is a good thing. Don't demand anything for it, keep it free. Pass it on for free and the world will be an infinitely richer and better place. It's how science works and how all learning should work. It should all be free.
