Re: I'm confused

[Aaron Swartz <aswartz@swartzfam.com>]

Jeff Barr <jeff@vertexdev.com> wrote:

> I agree with Steven and I am aghast at what Aaron proposes.

Sorry, I think I was misunderstood. I did not mean to suggest this as a
possible plan for RSS-DEV or syndication -- merely a hypothetical
possibility. Please do construe anything I say here as the message of the
RSS-DEV working group. If such a situation were to happen, it could be
resolved many ways, but none of them would invalidate the spec as far as I
understand.

> As far as I remember this goes against the wishes of RSS-DEV
> and Syndication -- the plan was to pick a new name that
> would clearly indicate that RSS and "The Other Thing" are
> different.

I'm confused. What are you referring to as "The Other Thing"? I always
thought that many on syndication supported the addition of several elements
to RSS, keeping the name the same, but incrementing the version (RSS 0.92,
RSS 0.93, etc.). Wouldn't this have the same problem?

> You can't issue a standard that preempts something Netscape
> has done and then offer to retract it if they complain. The
> real world just does not work this way.

Hmm, then perhaps I live in a different world than you do. If RSS were a
software project, that had clearly been abandoned by its developers, would
it be wrong of me to (independently) issue a new version, using all new
code? If there was no one I could contact at the software company about it,
I would go ahead and release a new version. If there are problems, we would
resolve them when they came up. However, I seriously doubt this would
happen. 

AFAIK, we're doing nothing illegal. Netscape doesn't own a registered
trademark on the letters RSS.

We're moving forward. We don't have time to waste to let all these little
hypothetical situations play themselves out. We've done the best we can,
we're going to go ahead, if there are problems, we'll do our best to fix
them.

I hope that that's the right thing to do,
-- 
[ Aaron Swartz | me@aaronsw.com | http://www.aaronsw.com ]