Graceful Exits

What happens when nobody will take responsibility for a standard that the web relies on?
RSS, the standard millions of us use to syndicate content, and view other people’s syndicated content, was originally invented by Ramanathan Guha at Netscape, for use on its my.netscape.com portal. Soon afterwards, Netscape lost interest in the format, leaving it ownerless [...]

Don’t get me wrong: I think that Stallman has contributed massively to the open-source movement. But Tim O’Reilly is right: he simply doesn’t get the problem that closed web services present. I think talking about open access to the data is missing the point too. Often I’ve no wish to access the raw data, and [...]