Pushback
This post might get me some pushback, but I'm annoyed.
Basically, I think Dave has really lost it this time. There's a line between being thin-skinned and being utterly paranoid and Winer has crossed it and then some. I think 0xDECAFBAD has a nice summary of why what Dave said is just plain wrong. I don't have much to add except only to give my support to those on the receiving end of Dave's delusional accusations.
All this rancor started because of the move towards updating the RSS spec to a new version. I don't "know" any of the people involved, but I read their weblogs pretty regularly and I can say that it's 100% clear where the problem lies in this process and who the troublemaker is. The thing is with Dave's 2.5 million hits in the past year - 780 blogroll links according to the Ecosystem (and god knows how many RSS hits) - many people are going to get this warped view of the situation. There are actually going to be people out there who think Dave's life is in danger because of a fucking XML spec. Please. Dave has the capacity to produce good stuff, but this is garbage. Add my voice to the chorus of people who are saying the same thing.
On the topic of RSS, they're talking about changing its name on the RSS-DEV mailing list (which I just signed up for) and I think it's a great idea. Routing around the problem. I really hope they do it... I think that 1) in a year Radio will be much, much less popular as a weblogging/aggregating tool than it is now so it's support won't matter much and 2) community driven specs are always the way to go. They're slow sometimes (all the time?) but the results almost always are for the best.
That's my two cents. Probably just more noise, but reading that post this morning just blew my mind. Made me angry, really.
-Russ