A reminder that we should be thankful for the academic orgins of the winning Internet standards. We could live in a world of fragmented protocols and pay walls

A reminder that we should be thankful for the academic orgins of the winning Internet standards. We could live in a world of fragmented protocols and pay walls at every turn. Instead we live in a world where the hacker standard prevails - that everything should be free unless it is truly a unique value add. Imagine if Linux or BSD had been positioned such that they won the consumer OS war. Now imagine if AOL won the war for consumer Internet standards. Some may argue, but I believe this could have happened had TCP/IP and HTML not landed full force with as such an open, powerful, and stable alternative - largely due to years of academic and scientific influence. AOL failed to adopt the way Microsoft did, and the open Internet was already compelling as a consumer experience, so they would have had a more difficult time competing - but it might have happened. Had the same occurred for consumer OS, we could live in a different world of open desktop standards. We appear to be headed that way 30 years later through the browser, but it's going to take at least another 5 or 10 years to supplant proprietary desktop OSes. We do have a similar battle going on for the mobile platform. I'm an avid Apple user and fan, but I'm rooting ultimately for HTML5 as the standard for developing apps. Let's just hope it's good enough to compete.