|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Jon Udell and Brent Simmons comment on today's news.  There was some confusing language in the announcement that I'd like to try to clear up. When we said we are independent, we meant independent of Berkman. You and a couple of your friends could start an advisory board and have no more or less authority than the one we started. Second, we wish to advise people who use RSS. We are not, in any way, advising Berkman, Harvard Law School or Harvard University. Dan Gillmor: "RSS is absolutely vital. It must be flexible enough for the aggregator creators to adopt in their own innovative ways. It must be kept out of the hands of corporate monopolists and would-be monopolists." Pat Rock: "I just can't tell you how cool this is." Tristan Louis: Extending the Olive Branch. Chuq von Rospach: "My support and $3 will buy you a Frap at Starbucks." Morbus Iff: "Bravisimo." RSS 2.0 News  There's lots of movement with RSS to announce today.  1. On Tuesday, July 15, UserLand Software transferred its copyright in the RSS 2.0 spec to Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. This addresses one of the major concerns about RSS 2.0, that it was published by one of the competitors in the RSS application space. That no longer is true.2. The spec is licensed under terms that allow it to be customized, excerpted and republished, using the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike license. So Berkman is basically acting as a distributor for the technology. We hope that this will inspire new profiles that extend RSS so it can meet the needs of diverse applications. 3. Since UserLand specifically disclaimed ownership of the format that the specification describes, no transfer took place on the format itself. 4. An independent advisory board has been formed to promote the wider use of RSS, to maintain the spec according to the roadmap, and to remove one of the major objections, that only UserLand could answer questions about RSS. The three-member board votes, the majority rules. The three board members are Brent Simmons, Jon Udell and Dave Winer. 5. The first task for the advisory board is to carefully review the RSS 2.0 specification in its new context. Quite a few documents moved, there probably are broken links. Help from the community is requested. 6. A place for comments, questions and suggestions. Other news Saturday night pizza with Scoble in Silicon Valley. News.Com: "Yahoo's acquisition of Overture Services could give it some potent legal ammunition in its battle with Google in the lucrative Web search market." Yesterday we posted a Legal FAQ for our weblog hosting site. Comment here. A Murphy Morning Good morning Scripting News people.  This morning we have some important news related to RSS, not quite ready to unveil yet. I was going to say Murphy-willing, but then I checked the server that's hosting the new site, and found there's a routing problem of some kind. Of course the server has never had this problem before. Murphy works in mysterious ways!  Postscript: Magically the server is back. Must have been a routing problem. Onward! We make mistakes here On Don Park's site someone calls me an emperor with no clothes. There's a disconnect that I would like to correct. I am not an emperor, I am a person. You will see mistakes here because I am human. This is not a major discovery. I see them too. BTW, if you think you don't make mistakes, you do; you're making one right there. Hey people like that  I'm getting lots of happy email about that last section. Let me expand on the theme. Not only do I make mistakes, but sometimes as I'm making them, I know I'm doing it. And sometimes it takes me a long time to correct them. Consider this. I smoked at least one pack of Marlboro Lights every day for thirty-one years.Thirty-one years. Then I needed heart surgery to stay alive. That's when I quit. You want give me shit for being stupid, why dick around with the small stuff -- go for the gusto. |
 
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
© Copyright 1997-2005 Dave Winer. The picture at the top of the page may change from time to time. Previous graphics are archived. Previous/Next |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
