Questions for Dave Winer…

Dear Mr Winer,

• 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?

I should add that I don’t really have much of an opinion about the whole Typekey thing at the moment. Certainly we need something to deal with comment-spam, certainly a centralised service will help with that and make things easier, yes I’d rather have an open standard or set of protocols that allow completely decentralised system if I could think of any way it could be done (but offhand I can’t).

Addendum: I have to confess that I’m not terribly interested in this stuff – I was making a fairly light-hearted and facetious point that really wasn’t particularly well-expressed. I was clumsy in a variety of places, and for that I apologise. All I was saying, I guess, is that Dave’s questions made it sound like Six Apart had a reputation for proprietorial formats and patenting stuff and not opening up APIs – and that I don’t really see any evidence of that. And – realistically – Dave is still associated with Userland and Userland is still a competitor of SixApart – so I can’t really see why they should feel any particular obligation to answer those questions. (Particularly given that Userland attempted to trademark RSS a few years ago – a move that could be seen to be directly against the kind of openness that Dave’s interrogating Six Apart about.)

Anyway, I certainly don’t feel qualified enough to comment in any depth about the business practices of either Six Apart or Userland in this context and these are not positions that I’d be prepared to battle to my last breath to protect. So I’m going to back down gracefully, only saying that I hope that it’s clear why I had the impression that I had, however inaccurate it may or may not have been. I also apologise to anyone who was offended or feels mischaracterised and I hope we can put this all behind us.