At the ICWE conference dinner last night, it was proudly announced that they have finally signed a long term contract with Springer for proceedings publication.

I. Am. Confused.

This seems like a backward step. Locking another generation of researchers into a broken system of academic elitism and inaccessibility of knowledge. This does not conjure an appropriate picture of the future for the Web engineering community. Why have we engineered ourselves into a paywalled corner of static PDFs? Aren't we supposed to be pioneering here? Why is it such an "achievement" to pay a huge pile of money to a for-profit company to keep all of our hard work in a dead end, which our libraries and institutions have to pay again to get it back out of?

Is everyone just cool with this?