Forking, the name game, the politics of naming

[Jeff Bone <jbone@jump.net>]

Aaron Swartz wrote:

> Really, I'm having trouble seeing what all the fuss is about.

Let me see if I can sum it up.  The basic problem appears to be that a group
of folks want to take a direction with RSS which, in the opinion of the
original stakeholders and promoters of RSS, is not in the spirit of the
original RSS spec.  We all seem to acknowledge that there's too much
ideological distance between the camps to reasonably work on a single effort,
and therefore forking is inevitable.  The controversy is purely on which
effort --- the new and improved and totally revised and overly complexified
effort or the brutally simple incremental improvement effort --- gets to keep
using the RSS name.  Given that the original stakeholders are in favor of the
simpler version, IMO they should get to keep the name.  I think there's been
some agreement about that, too.

Right?

jb