Tim O’Reilly, Richard Scoble, Mitchell Baker, and seven other leading figures in the Web community talked to the BBC recently about their hopes for the future of the web.

Tim O’Reilly:

We created the first commercial website with a special dispensation from the National Science Foundation. We were interested in online publishing and we were thinking of how to get books online and then the web came along and we thought: ‘Oh my god this is the answer to our prayers’.

The web was this promise of a universal platform for information and it was just transformative and so exciting to see that potential come into play.

The fact that Tim Berners-Lee gave it away was so critical to that. l imagine if someone tried to commercialise it, maybe it would have taken off but that was what Microsoft and AOL tried to do.

Free is such a powerful force in innovation.

Read the read the rest of Tim’s interview and the other nine interviews here.