I wasn't involved at the time, but what I've gathered over the years is that the early history of blogging and rss involved competing standards and personal and technical rivalries. My understanding is that Winer is an ardent self-promoter, quite opinionated, and rubs some people strongly the wrong way. He's created a bunch of cool and interesting stuff, and proudly claims credit for stuff some people don't think he deserves credit for. I don't really know who's right and who's wrong, I suspect there's at least a little fault on all sides.

I think if Winer had explained or given footnotes, it would have distracted from the point of what I thought was a very powerful essay, but then I agree with him about Stallman.

Dave Winer can claim credit only for the 2.0 version of RSS. The earliest version of RSS was invented by Dan Libby at Netscape. In 2006 I wrote up a thorough overview of the history of RSS up to that point:

http://www.teamlalala.com/blog/2006/10/24/rss-has-been-damag...

Nevertheless, Winer's point about Stallman is valid and I personally agree with him.

I don't care who you are, or where you're from. Even if "I disapprove of what you say, ... I will defend to the death your right to say it" (- Voltaire? no primary source)

The internet would be a lot smaller and less interesting if we only let "normal" people in!

Wikipedia gives him credit for part of 0.91: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_web_syndication_tech...

Dave is someone who has strong opinions and has been involved in things like RSS and web logging for many many years. He is often early to the party or the driving force behind a lot of things we take for granted today. RSS, podcasting, blogging, XML-RPC, SOAP, significant work on outliners.

Often when others join the party and he has something to say about their implementation or contribution he will say it in a pretty direct manner. This has led to some interesting spats. Some that come to mind:

RSS vs ATOM

Harsh/sarcastic words and criticism by Mark Pilgrim (dive into python guy)

Aaron Swartz wrote a service to watch for edits in Dave's blogs posts a long time ago to see if he was chaining "history."

Finally, just scroll down on this page you will see that the general reaction seems to be more negative than usual. A lot of time resorting to personal attacks.

For those of you who don't know his writing he has stuff online back to '95 or maybe earlier and it would serve the younger techies well to go back and take a look with an open mind.

That wasn't Swartz. The late[1] Mark Pilgrim wrote the Winer Watcher software.

1: Late as in dead from the Internet since 10/4/2011, not dead as in life.

Apologies to Aaron for the incorrect attribution. I can no longer edit the post.

Dave Winer's feeling butthurt about the bad press he got in 2004 over abruptly taking 3,000 blogs offline at his free hosting site Weblogs.Com without giving those users any notice:

http://lawmeme.research.yale.edu/modules.php?name=News&f...

A year later he sold Weblogs.Com without all those freeloaders to VeriSign for $2.3 million, so you'd think he'd feel pretty good regardless.

But nobody nurses a grudge like him. Except maybe me.

Everyone hates on his lack of tact. It has been made worse by his unfortunate recent comment on Steve Jobs. It's not infighting, it is the community almost as a whole.

There's also been a lot of people using his lack of tact to point out how weird he is, and how much they dislike him, which is kind of sad.

Sometimes, the worst oppressors are the formerly oppressed, and I think the same may apply to bullying. There's no scorn like the geek's scorn for someone geekier than they consider acceptable.

Stallman says something tactless and suddenly gets allot of coverage on HN leading to more discussion of free software etc.

Funny how that works , maybe he isn't as dumb as we think.

Mr Stallman recently said that although he regretted Mr Job's death, he wasn't sorry that the creator of the walled garden of locked down consumer computing devices was no more.

This caused some discussion along the lines of Mr Stallman :

1) should be hunted down and killed for mentioning the sainted Mr Jobs

or

2) is the only one with the courage to stand up and say what he believes.

(delete as appropriate)