Goodbye and thanks for all the fish

Big news in the RSS world as Dave Winer announces that he is leav­ing the RSS Advi­sory Board. I’d like to take this oppor­tu­nity to thank him for all his hard work on this format.

Back in the late 90s, when RSS was about to die a quick death after Netscape aban­doned it, it was Dave that cured it back to health, real­iz­ing its poten­tial and work­ing hard to turn it into some­thing that would be more sig­nif­i­cant than just pre­sent­ing items on the Netscape per­sonal page.

Dave has been a con­tro­ver­sial fig­ure in the RSS world but with­out his con­tri­bu­tion, RSS would not be what it is today. Other efforts in the syn­di­ca­tion space have with­ered and died but Dave con­tin­ued being the “defender of the RSS faith” and ensured that it con­tin­ued evolv­ing. Last year, in an attempt to make his own per­son­al­ity a non-issue in the future of RSS, he cre­ated the RSS advi­sory board and put RSS under a cre­ative com­mons license.

Like him or not, you can’t deny that Dave has been the biggest con­trib­u­tor to the RSS world to date. Con­grats Dave on mov­ing on and here’s to hop­ing that you’ll con­tinue being involved.