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

Re: Asking Tim

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:9/20/2000; 6:13:12 PM
Topic:Asking Tim
Msg #:21560 (In response to 21559)
Prev/Next:21559 / 21561

Tim, there were other O'Reilly people involved, Dale Dougherty and Edd Dumbill, not just Rael. The first hint that there was trouble, from my pov, was an article on Edd's weblog where he cites a conversation with Dale about the future of RSS. It's pretty clear at this point that Dale is in charge. Up until that point, I thought we were working with O'Reilly. I had just completed a full week's worth of work getting a baseline spec done for 0.91, so that we could start adding the features that Dale was asking for. It's so weird, in Amsterdam Dale was asking me to do work for him. Just as I was getting started, I saw that post on Edd's weblog.

Now of course there's nothing wrong with them discussing the future of RSS, and it's especially good that it was done in public, but Tim, as an expert in this area, I didn't then, and don't now agree with the direction they wanted to take it. Dale seemed to be somewhat in the middle.

I didn't flame anyone on the Syndication mail list. It had been very quiet there. You can check the archives. I assumed they were going to fork or that RSS was frozen, I didn't think, once, they'd try to force the Namespaces+RDF approach on RSS.

I met with Dale two weeks before the announcement, and he didn't say anything about it being called RSS 1.0. I spoke on the phone with Rael the Friday before it was announced, again he didn't say that they were calling it RSS 1.0. The first I found out about it was when it was publicly announced.

Let me ask you a straight question. If it turns out that the plan to call the new spec "RSS 1.0" was done in private, without any heads-up or consultation, or for a chance for the Syndication list members to agree or disagree, not just me, what are you going to do?

UserLand did a lot of work to create and popularize and support RSS. We walked away from that, and let your guys have the name. That's the top level. If I want to do any further work in Web syndication, I have to use a different name. Why and how did that happen Tim? Please explain so that the readers here can clearly hear your point of view on this.

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