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Comment by Angostura | Hacker News Reader

It would be good to be able to downvote this egregious bit of flamebait

Flamebait? He is pointing out the hypocrisy of Tim presenting himself as the moral guardian of the web.... as Tim ran W3C for all of these years.

There is no hypocrisy. Tim said that DRM is a reality and that it should be standardized. Some people did not like that. We owe Tim a great debt of gratitude for inventing the web and bypassing any opportunities available to him to patent his invention so that the technology would be freely available. The OP should show him some respect.

I really don't understand people fascination with idolization. There is no such thing as "one person alone invented this great technology".

Yeah, I don't have any informed opinions on Tim's role in DRM or related things, but the idolization surrounding him always left a bad taste in my mouth.

No idolization of Mr. Berners-Lee here. But certainly some respect. I think it's the dream of many engineers to product someone that many people use.

Tim invented three protocols that many people frequently use: HTTP, HTML, and URI/URL. He wnt out of his way to make sure these technologies were not encumbered by patents and made the specs and prototype code freely available, with no profit going to himself.

Do you not think this is deserving of some respect? He doesn't deserve the OP's personal attacks.

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