University of Southampton
Academics working at the university include Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, Wendy Hall, inventor of Microcosm (hypermedia system) a predecessor of the World Wide Web, founding director of the Web Science Trust between the University of Southampton and MIT, José Antonio Bowen, President of Goucher College and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Erich Zepler, who made leading contributions to radio receiver development, David Payne, who invented EDFA for use in fibre optics cables, Sir Barry Cunliffe, a pioneer of modern British archaeology, Ray Monk, the biographer of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Albie Sachs, former Judge of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, and Tim Holt, former President of the Royal Statistical Society and Office for National Statistics.
Eolas
In Autumn 2003, the inventor of the World Wide Web and the Director of the W3C Consortium Tim Berners-Lee wrote to the Under Secretary of Commerce, asking for this patent to be invalidated, in order to "eliminate this major impediment to the operation of the Web". Leaders of Open Source Community sided with Microsoft in fighting the patent due to its threat to the free nature of the Web and to the basic established HTML standards. The specific concerns of having one company (Eolas) controlling a critical piece of the Web framework were cited.