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Re: 2002 as the year of XML (meltdown due to patents)

• To: <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: 2002 as the year of XML (meltdown due to patents)
• From: "Dave Winer" <dave@u...>
• Date: Mon, 7 Jan 2002 11:17:53 -0800
• Cc: "UserLand-Internal" <UserLand-Internal@u...>,<jack@c...>
• References: <4F4182C71C1FDD4BA0937A7EB7B8B4C103D54A8E@r...>

Joshua, of course I'd dispute that I forked RSS, but who cares, you're
right -- I believed then and now that the complexity of RDF is inappropriate
to a format like RSS whose goal is easy deployment by non-technical people.
It is so ironic to have been dragged into this patent mess over RDF. This
patent stuff adds so much confusion that didn't used to be there.

What to do. What if I come up with a new format that isn't called RSS that
has no linkage to RDF. What happens when the lawyers one-up each other and
someone shows us their patent for XML? OK, then I revert to comma-delimited
text files, but someone else has a patent on that. I could go back to the
text-based format I used in the 80s, before they were issuing software
patents.

Now I not only have to grok the lunacy of other developers, I have to
predict what lawyers will do, and then judges and juries. Put another way,
if you knew a young person today who wanted to study computer science, would
you advise them to also get a law degree so they can actually practice the
art?

How many programmers want to become lawyers? I didn't. Ooops.

Dave

PS: I made sure to preserve the art of the 80s in case we have to deal with
lawyers on OPML -- it is totally derivative of what we were doing then,
which was called dothead format. ThinkTank and MORE still read it, as does
Frontier and Radio.

• References:
  • RE: 2002 as the year of XML (meltdown due to patents)
    • From: "Joshua Allen" <joshuaa@m...>

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