Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Asking Tim

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:9/20/2000; 8:20:17 AM
Topic:Asking Tim
Msg #:21540 (In response to 21537)
Prev/Next:21539 / 21541

Thanks for commenting Tim.

The email you quote came after the email you sent about me being excluded from O'Reilly-sponsored events. This has been typical of our email exchanges, a loss of continuity. You're right I said that, but it was in response to your statement. And I apologize for saying that, it was in the heat of the moment. There was a lot of other stuff going on in my life, and all the heat around the RSS thing was distracting me from things I had to deal with. The rest of the email you quote was me backing off and saying go ahead and use the name RSS, we'll use RSS-Classic or something like that. It was basically giving you everything you were trying to take. I didn't even get a thank you from anyone at O'Reilly. That's how screwed up everything had become at that point.

I'm glad you decided to post a response here. I hope you'll be a frequent contributor here. You might find that you're grabbing fruits of work that's far deeper than you understand. RSS is just a small part of what we do. We'd be happy to help you steal it, as long as you don't write us out of the story, and keep us from moving forward with our ideas. David Brown summarized it by saying "You just want to finish the thought." If look more closely, RSS was a first step, one that we did in 1997, almost three years ago. Lots more was built between then and now, and lots more is coming, and it's quite relevant to your interest in P2P.

If we could focus the discussion on technology, not personalities, we'd get a lot further. Note that I pointed to your essay on what is open source. I feel there are ways we can help each other. But the private back-channel wasn't working. We did have a working relationship with O'Reilly dating back to last summer. Perhaps you didn't know about it, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen.

The RSS episode says that O'Reilly will do exactly what it wants, in private, without consulting with companies it partners with. If you want to correct that behavior, I would be happy to help. If not, UserLand is certainly not the last company to get burned for trusting your company. That needs to be addressed, publicly Tim. I understand that you didn't want that, but sorry, I don't make deals to cover this kind of stuff up.

Let's have this discussion in public. If you want, use your DG where you have editorial control. There's a configuration error in Manila on your server, as was pointed out elsewhere. We'd be happy to help you get that DG going.

Towards professional and productive discourse!

Dave

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