Extending the Olive Branch

Con­grat­u­la­tions to Dave Winer for real­iz­ing that his per­son­al­ity had become a polar­iz­ing force in the RSS dis­cus­sions and for basi­cally giv­ing RSS 2.0 to the com­mu­nity.

There is really noth­ing I can say that really expresses how amaz­ing I find this move.

By putting the spec­i­fi­ca­tion under an Attribution/Share Alike Cre­ative Com­mons license, Dave has essen­tially man­age to make the rights on this spec­i­fi­ca­tion very clear. This should put an end to any dis­cus­sion related to how much con­trol User­land exerts on the specification.

The cre­ation of an advi­sory board is also a move in the right direc­tion. If there is one thing I would rec­om­mend, how­ever, it is the elec­tion of two extra mem­bers that would be voted on by the com­mu­nity. This might be to con­sider in the future but my con­grat­u­la­tions go to all mem­bers of the cur­rent advi­sory board. It is a tough job but one that I’m sure you will all do well.

Once again, Dave, thanks for this great gift to the com­mu­nity. This, to me, has to be the most impor­tant announce­ment in the syn­di­ca­tion space in sev­eral years and will ensure that the spec­i­fi­ca­tion will move for­ward, hope­fully putting behind us a lot of the per­sonal attacks that have mired the stan­dard recently. 10–20-30 years from now, peo­ple will look back and see this moment as equiv­a­lent to the first time Tim Berners-Lee typed “http://” and the first time a ping packet was sent.

This is the great­est gift made to the online com­mu­nity since Tim Berners-Lee decided that he was going to give every com­po­nents of the web to all of us.