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At 10:01 AM -0500 6/27/03, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
>If you take RSS, claim it, rename it, but are
>essentially still building over it, it is
>piracy. No one can stop you from doing it
>now because the owner of the ship left the
>holds unlocked, shared his decks, and in
>effect, gave you the access... just as the
>ethos of the open source/web culture said
>he should to succeed. I have to question
>both that culture and that success if we
>urge others to take advantage of him and call
>it community. A community of what? Pirates?
If he had patented it and tried to assert more control over it, it
would have gone exactly nowhere. Probably other people would have
invented similar tools that would have succeeded by virtue of being
open. And perhaps if the community had been more involved in the
development of RSS from the get-go and weren't held hostage by the
ego of one developer, a lot of the serious flaws in RSS might have
been avoided completely. There was one very good idea in RSS, (put
headlines and links in an XML document) but the original spec and
application were embarrassingly bad.
--
Elliotte Rusty Harold
elharo@metalab.unc.edu
Processing XML with Java (Addison-Wesley, 2002)
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xmljava
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0201771861/cafeaulaitA
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