A quick note of appreciation for Martin Nisenholtz, who is leaving the NY Times. 

The Times will of course tell the story of what he did for them. But he also made a very large contribution to the web, through RSS 2.0. It was his decision, to license the flow of NYT stories to UserLand Software, in March 2002, that made it possible for us to provide their huge story flow to users of our product.  

We also decided to make this flow available to our competitors, most of whom didn't exist yet. That was when the arguing stopped in the tech world, and we all got busy developing software. And the publishing world had a leader to follow, and that's what they did. This was made possible by an act of faith by an exec at the Times. That person was Martin.  

So I think it's important to note that the man has not only contributed to his organization, he also made a serious contribution to the open Internet.