I'm Rogers Cadenhead, the chairman of the RSS Advisory Board.
What W3C is doing is correct. It is republishing our copy of the RSS specification under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike license and using our preferred authorship credit: RSS Advisory Board with a link to https://www.rssboard.org/.
The RSS Advisory Board has published the RSS 2.0 specification for 20 years. Over that time we have revised it 10 times, mostly in minor ways such as to fix a broken link.
The board began publishing the spec under a Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike license when Dave Winer was still a member. It is redistributable under the terms of that license forever.
Winer wrote this on his blog in 2003:
"On July 15, UserLand Software transferred ownership of its RSS 2.0 specification to the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.
"Berkman then placed a Creative Commons license on the spec, allowing it to be customized, excerpted and republished. ...
"The spec can circulate freely thanks to the Creative Commons."
The credit line on the specification has been unchanged since Aug. 12, 2006: "This document is authored by the RSS Advisory Board and is offered under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike license, based on an original document published by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society."
We've never been asked to change that, by Dave Winer or anyone else.
Because of his new request for an attribution change, the credit line now reads, "This document is authored by the RSS Advisory Board and is offered under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike license, based on an original document published by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society authored by Dave Winer, founder of UserLand Software."
There should never be something about 'respect' when it comes to a specification.
When I publish anything on the web, do I have to give credit to Tim Berners-Lee each time?
A specification isn't a badge of honor, it's a useful tool, one among many. Other than clarification of who is currently authority for, and making changes to, a specification, there should be no names on any spec or standard.
Respect is also a useful tool. It reduces conflicts just as diplomacy reduces violence. Yes, respect can be set aside but, when you do, expect controversy.
Why would anyone want to invite unnecessary controversy when writing a spec?
Funnily enough the changes were made based on a bug report by Tim Berners-Lee himself, who noticed link rot and missing links to specifications. Hence the commits by an W3C employee, who cleaned up the markup and apparently took the RSS 2.0 spec from the RSS Board website.
Which in effect is understandable from the employees point of view – an RSS board seems vastly more official and stable than a link on a random subdomain of Harvard’s Berkman Center.
Only if you have been a reader of Winer’s multiple different weblogs 15+ years back, you’ll know the issue. Very quick and abridged recap of the Feed Format Wars:
• Winer’s Userland Software took Netscape’s RSS 0.9x, slightly changed it and promoted it as official RSS.
• The RSS 1.0 Working group wanted an RSS in RDF terms and build a rival RSS 1.0.
• Winer published RSS 2.0 in response.
• People still had problems with the RSS 2.0 spec and some lack of clarity and formed a different effort in response, which later morphed into Atom which found a home at the IETF as an RFC.
• People still had questions about parsing RSS 2.0. In 2003 Winer moved RSS 2.0 to Harvard’s Berkman Center – he was a fellow at that time – transferred copyright and “ownership” of the spec and set up an RSS Advisory Board, which could “clarify” open questions.
So, from Dave Winer’s perspective the RSS Board has nothing to do with the spec, which in his perspective only lives on a Harvard subdomain. The Board practically didn’t exist and linking to them is in error. The spec is ultimately frozen.
From the RSS Boards perspective it was set up, the initial founder resigned and threw a tantrum, when later the board took its mission seriously.
And from a random reader’s perspective the rssboard.org website seems massively more useful, by publishing the clarified specs, the ecosystem of minor specs around them, a best practice profile and for the first time in RSS history a changelog. Before that we only had Mark Pilgrim’s rant:
As usual the feed format wars is a masterpiece in people not working together.
(And thankfully almost nobody cares except the people who back then spend too much time following the wars in the plethora of different blogs, almost all now have fallen victim to linkrot.)
As part of the RSS Advisory Board, I enjoyed the history lesson.
The W3C should keep publishing the RSS 2.0 specification along with the RSS 1.0 and Atom specifications in the documentation for its Feed Validation Service.
It can also republish the RSS Best Practices Profile that was created by the RSS Advisory Board, because it was released under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike 2.0 license.
At least for me, a Google search for "RSS 2.0 specification" shows W3C and RSSboard.org links as top results. The Berkman center location isn't even on the first page.
my perspective is that my name and copyright were removed from a document i wrote and re-published on the W3C site and that should be fixed. please don't speak for me. thanks.
i doubt if it will come to a DMCA takedown but that is a creative an interesting idea!
maybe someone else could post an issue to their repo. but as the author of the spec i really shouldn't have to do anything to get an esteemed organization like the W3C to respect a CC license and copyright.
The two aren't the same, one is about credit, and the recommendation is about hosting. The first can be solved by the author contacting W3C, and if they don't respond, then that is poor form by them.
> just point the original document and forget about hosting a copy. The Harvard website is not going anywhere.
Assuming the Harvard site might not, that document could go missing. It happens all the time and will continue to happen no matter how confident you may be in your systems and how many pinky promises you make. For the same reason that StackOverflow discourages links to answers instead of summaries on their site, keeping the documentation together means that there is continuity.
Imagine you click a link to view the RSS spec from W3C's site and you are hit by a maintenance page. That might be acceptable for blog posts linking to other sites, but for a spec site it feels important for everything to be as self contained as possible.
of course any document can go missing, but the RSS 2.0 spec has been at that location for 20+ years and was put there specifically to preserve it over time.
and of course it's no excuse for ignoring a copyright notice and removing authorship credit.
and if harvard's website should disappear then grab a copy from archive.org. or use the github repo we created for the spec.
there are lots of backups of that spec. it would be hard to lose it. ;-)
For a long time one of the main arguments between WHATWG (HTML 5 Living Standard) and W3C was that... W3C would copy HTML 5 specs, strip all copyright and contribution info, and post them to W3C site.
In more length: the term "HTML5" is widely used as a buzzword to refer to modern web technologies, many of which (though by no means all) are developed at the WHATWG. This document is one such; others are available from the WHATWG Standards overview.
What W3C is doing is correct. It is republishing our copy of the RSS specification under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike license and using our preferred authorship credit: RSS Advisory Board with a link to https://www.rssboard.org/.
The RSS Advisory Board has published the RSS 2.0 specification for 20 years. Over that time we have revised it 10 times, mostly in minor ways such as to fix a broken link.
The board began publishing the spec under a Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike license when Dave Winer was still a member. It is redistributable under the terms of that license forever.
Winer wrote this on his blog in 2003:
"On July 15, UserLand Software transferred ownership of its RSS 2.0 specification to the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.
"Berkman then placed a Creative Commons license on the spec, allowing it to be customized, excerpted and republished. ...
"The spec can circulate freely thanks to the Creative Commons."
http://scripting.com/davenet/2003/07/28/harvardHostsKeyWeblo...