Tim Berners-Lee gets some bux at last

[eridani]

Thank heavens that Bill Gates bought MS-DOS instead of TCP/IP.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/06/15/bernerslee.free.ap/index.html

HELSINKI, Finland (AP) -- Tim Berners-Lee, who received a €1 million ($1.2 million) cash prize for creating the World Wide Web, says he would never have succeeded if he had charged money for his inventions.

"If I had tried to demand fees ... there would be no World Wide Web," Berners-Lee, 49, said Tuesday at a ceremony for winning the first Millennium Technology Prize. "There would be lots of small webs."

The prize committee agreed, citing the importance of Berners-Lee's decision never to commercialize or patent his contributions to the Internet technologies he had developed, and recognizing his revolutionary contribution to humanity's ability to communicate.

Berners-Lee, who is originally from Britain and was knighted last December, has mostly avoided both the fame and the fortune won by many of his Internet colleagues. Despite his prize, he remained modest about his achievements.

"I was just taking lots of things that already existed and added a little little bit," said Berners-Lee, who now runs the standard-setting World Wide Web Consortium from an office at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.