Dave is a target again--that's a shame.
Tom Coates at Plastic Bag asks Dave Winer some questions about Radio/Frontier and UserLand:
Will the API for radiocomments be public and clonable?If so, will the API for radiocomments be published before the initial deployment of the radiocomments system?
Will it be possible for Radio users to plug into a non-Userland scripting system?
Will the process for designing the radiocomments API be open or will it be designed exclusively by Userland?
Will Radio, Manila, or Frontier ever move to a non-proprietary scripting language?
Have you or will you file patents for the weblogs.com technology?
Some of these I can't answer since I'm not Dave, but Phil Ringnalda answered the first one. I'll take a crack at the third:
Radio users can plug into anything they want. They have access to weblog backups in XML and that means that anything that can read XML can read their old weblog entries. People have written scripts to convert Radio weblogs to Movable Type, as an example.
I like the fifth question above, about the proprietary scripting language. I say this with respect: who cares? The language is similar enough to others that the learning curve is short (for an experienced coder), plus the environments built-in debugger is great. It's easy to deploy and runs on Mac and Windows nearly identically, except on the Mac it's twice as slow, but that's another rant.
It's time for everyone to put their buckets of mud down and see how dirty things have gotten. Work together and be remembered for something great. Work against each other and be remembered as the "guys who bickered all of the time". Dave's trying. Are the rest of us?
- Posted by Steve Kirks - 5:29:01 PM - comments [] -
