March 25 in Cupertino

Wednesday, March 1, 2000 by Dave Winer.

Good morning!  

An unusual amount of email going out this week. A little more followup on Amazon and then news of an event on March 25 in Cupertino, CA.

An author and an engineer  

It's noteworthy that the business of Tim O'Reilly, who posted an open plea to Amazon, depends to some extent on Amazon. Tim is CEO of O'Reilly Associates, a big technical book publisher.

Therefore it's also noteworthy when a best-selling book author, Danny Goodman, takes a stand.

http://scriptingnews.userland.com/stories/storyReader$410

Both Danny and Tim risk losing money by expressing their beliefs about web patents. That gives their statements more credibility. People of integrity say what they believe even if costs them money. Perhaps *especially* if it costs them money.

I also got a pointer to an essay written by Paul Barton-Davis. "As one of the founding programmers at Amazon.com, I was very dismayed to learn of the company's legal attempts to enforce its 1-Click patent."

http://www.op.net/~pbd/amazon-1click.html

March 25 in Cupertino  

On March 25 we'll have a meeting of people who use Manila, who develop with Frontier, their friends, and people who participate in UserLand.Com.

The meeting will be from 1 to 5PM in Forum 1 at De Anza College in Cupertino, CA. The De Anza campus is famous for hosting Apple annual shareholder meetings and product rollouts. The Mac was introduced at De Anza in January 1984. (Already a long time ago!)

We've started a Manila site to provide more information about the meeting, and to provide a place to discuss what we will do on the 25th.

http://march25.editthispage.com/

While the meeting will be largely about Manila and EditThisPage.Com, and may get technical, DaveNet readers who are in the area are welcome too. This is an important part of what I've been writing about for the last six years, the Web, When you really distill it down, the Web is a room full of people sharing ideas, intelligence and enthusiasm. That of course, to me, describes DaveNet as well.

So, on March 25, that room that is the Web, will become a real room with real human beings! It should be pretty interesting.

Let's make March 25 a great success for our community!

Dave Winer  

PS: UserLand will demo revolutionary new software on March 25. FYI! ;->