Saturday, December 9, 2006

What Would I Ask Sir Tim Berners-Lee?

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is an interesting person, he seems uncorrupted by the temptation to make money off his invention, the internet. As one article briefly mentioned, his partner at the time became a multi-millionaire as one of the founders of the web-browser, Netscape. And yet Tim Berners-Lee still works in a small office at MIT, only recently winning the 1.3 million euro Millenium Technology prize, a modest amount of money compared to other internet moguls. From this modesty, I wonder what kind of ethos guides his life decisions.
Based on a statement made in one article he said that,
"A good blogger when he says that something's happened will have a point to back, and there's a certain ethos within the blogging community, you always point to your source, you point all the way back to the original article."

And in yet another article the term ethos was used again, that web science
"has its own ethos: decentralization to avoid social and technical bottlenecks, openness to the reuse of information in unexpected ways, and fairness."
This second view of ethos is written by Tim Berners Lee. If asking him about ethos, his moral outlook, I would like to know what, in greater detail, it might be. By being such a strong proponent of open and fair use, it may be a good guideline for librarians to use.

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