CNET: Dispute exposes bitter power struggle behind Web logs
Dave Winer, inventor of the Really Simple Syndication (RSS) standard popularly used to distribute weblog content, may have thought he was putting to rest questions of who should control the standard when he donated the intellectual property of RSS to a Harvard University foundation.
But competitive efforts for a more complex standard have only gained in popularity, indicating that the cause behind their genesis was not Dave Winer's control. Developers, instead, cite the fact that Winer effectively froze the core technology of RSS, preventing further modification and the addition of new features.
The debate about whether the RSS standard should be handed over to a professional standards organization, such as W3C or the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), belies a philosophical disagreement about the very soul of blogging: a complex, commercial standard means that much of the syndication effort will be taken out of the hands of individual bloggers, putting it into the hands of large corporations.
Google, owner of the Blogger program, has already supported a new effort backed by IBM.
"The reason the core is frozen is to keep the developers from screwing with it. RSS is simple," Winer said to CNET. "They want to make it complicated so they can charge hundreds of thousands of dollars to implement it for you. Someone like IBM does consulting for publishing systems. If RSS were to take off, they would lose those contracts."
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