If Tim Berners-Lee had decided to patent his idea in 1989

[Chndru]

Sir Tim Berners-Lee said upon receiving the first Millennium Technology Prize, "Building the Web, I didn't do it all myself. The really exciting thing about it is that it was done by lots and lots of people, connected with this tremendous spirit."

Official Release [technologyawards.org]
[linuxinsider.com...]

Woohoo!

[trillianjedi]

Fantastic.

[tedster]

In an era of near obsession with "intellectual property" this man gave a gift to the whole planet. Awesome to see him get recognition and reward for that brilliant gift.

[grandpa]

If you can imagine a computer doing it, then you can write a computer program to do it.

That spirit has been behind so many wonderful developments.

That's been my mantra since my first "Hello World". Thank you Sir Berners-Lee.

[sidyadav]

Great. I owe it all to this man - and so does each and every website on the www. If it wasn't for him, we'd never be here :)

Thanks Sir Tim Berners-Lee!

Sid

[netscan]

If it wasn't for him, I'd still be on Prodigy... Ewww

[Xoc]

Inventing the web isn't that big a deal. There have been a lot of similar type things that just didn't take off, and Tim really didn't invent any of the concepts (servers {e.g. FTP servers}, markup languages [SGML], browsers {various}, or protocols {FTP protocol}). What Tim deserves the credit for is continuing to develop the web as director of the W3C. For that he deserves an immense amount of credit and every award that can be heaped on him.

[tombola]

Can you imagine what would have happened if it was not Tim Berners-Lee who "invented" the Web, but Bill G.?

[sidyadav]

> Can you imagine what would have happened if it was not Tim Berners-Lee who "invented" the Web, but Bill G.?

lol, Yup - It would cost 5c to use the Microsoft HTML Validator (alternatively, it would come bundled with FrontPage) ;)

Sid

[kevinpate]

So if TBL had been a glory hound, we might all be spending our days workin' and surfin' The Timmy

[HarleyGuy]

How much did Al Gore receive for his contribution?

[ergophobe]

How much did Al Gore receive for his contribution?

Darn! Beat me to it. Al Gore didn't invent the web, though, he invented the internet ;-)

Disclaimer: it's just a joke; no flames. I know that Gore never made such a claim and Newt Gingrinch acknowledges that Gore took the legislative lead and yadda yadda yadda.