freeform goodness

I don't have a beard :-p

At various stages in my adult life, I have been a bearded fat guy with an inordinate interest in syndication. The characterization stands. :-)

I'm preserving it here -- you can't make this stuff up. "So it seems now that anything that isn't being guarded will be grabbed and someone will try to own it. This the kind of hopeless desperation that we're surrounded by. Feedburner, Technorati, SixApart, Newsgator, these are companies that are so desperate to get bought out, presumably, that they literally tried to hijack ownership of the RSS specification from a much larger institution, a much older one, one with hugely deep pockets. I wonder what they were thinking. I wonder why they didn't make any inquiries with their lawyers before they tried it. Did they even do a Google search to find out if this large institution took ownership of this spec seriously? Or did they send me an email to ask what's up, or pick up the phone to call? Are they really as desperate as it seems they are? My guess is taht it's not, they jost belong to an industry with a tradition that personal relationships mean nothing, a very short-term way of thikning, that's mistaken. We'll all be back after our current ventures either succeed or fail, adn then all we'll ahve are our reputations. You may end up working with someone you ewre competing with. In any case, the RSS 2.0 specification is owned by Harvard University, and I don't think they're planning on selling it or giving it away. It's very generously licensed under teh Creative Commons share-alike for-attribution license. There's a contract that gives them the ownership. I am the author of the spec. So here's the idea. Next time someone makes you an offer that's too good to be true, before you agree to it, check it out first. If they're offering you something that someone else owns, check with the person or people who own it and see if it's okay with them, before you make a public announcement about how thrilled you are to be the new owner of this thing. Save everyone the embarassment of having to undo the mistake you would otherwise have made. And pat yourself on the back because you helped make your stupid industry a little less stupid."

Where did you find that? I can't.

I spotted that in comments on Rogers' blog. Someone caught it with NetNewsWire's "track differences" functionality -- it works a lot like the old "Winer Watcher" did, and this time it caught a doozy.

http://tinfinger.blogspot.com/2006/02/dave-winers-right-there-i-said-it.html

wherein the "bearded fat guy" crack is inevitably misunderstood.