Crunchitize Me, Arrington!

Michael Arrington, the publisher of TechCrunch and the human router at the center of Web 2.0, questions the work I did for Dave Winer on Weblogs.Com:

I was part of the weblogs.com transaction and was also very dissapointed with Rogers Cadenhead's performance. I have no information on the second part of the dispute.

Arrington was Winer's attorney on that project. I have no idea what he's referring to here, and he hasn't returned an e-mail on the subject. The entirety of our relationship was a few cordial e-mails exchanged during the execution of a work-for-hire contract.

That negotiation was simple. He sent an agreement and I told him this:

I've looked over the contract. I have no concerns aside from sections 5b. and 5c., which have non-compete language in them.

I can't agree to a provision that prevents me from doing substantially similar work for one year and prevents me from entering into the relationships described in 5c.

When I priced this job, it was under the assumption I'd be free to exploit my growing expertise in this area. If this is going to be my first and last job in weblog notification, we need to talk about additional compensation. Otherwise, I recommend removing 5b and 5c.

His response: "Go ahead and delete those." So I did.

I can't think of any reason for his disappointment, because both sides of that contract were happy with the outcome. Winer even acknowledges that it was a good experience, in spite of our disagreement over Share Your OPML.

I'm guessing this is an example of Friendship 2.0.

Comments

I'm living in Russia, and i can to say, that contracts with points like 5b and 5c are invalid for russian law ;)

Nope, this is Classic W[h]iner.

How predictible.

that's all kinds of rallying, i can safely guess that he's pulling in favors to not lose face..

Friendship 2.0 or circle jerk 2.0? These guys are starting to make me sick.

It still sickens me to see how Dave Winer totally borrowed the concept of RSS from Netscape, rewrote it , did a bunch of evengelizing and now claims to be the "father of RSS".

His history of RSS does not acknowledge the early work done at Netscape. Here is a more complete history.

I was an early adopter of the RDF format and remember hand-coding files for Netscape to read. I attribute my interest in this directly to Winer, but I distinctly recall this being a Netscape invention. Dave's role in RSS and the development syndication formats is an evengelical one at best.

Maybe Picasso was right when he said "Bad artists copy but great artists steal."

Friendship 2.0 :) Cool term.... when was Friendship Beta ;)

It's amazing how quickly a situation can get polarized. Then discussion quickly turns to some rock throwing on issues of tact.

Legitimate concerns over Dave Winer's bahaviors are buried in a avalanche of "Dave is an a**hole" comments and any criticism of the old badger is not worth addressing.

Blogging allows any one to weigh in and there have been a few articulate opinions of the situation but Robert, Mike and Nick's and Arrington's messages that "Dave is my friend" only serve, IMHO, to enable a friend's darkest perosnlity traits when I'd love to see a friend echo Randy's simple summary over the lawyer's letter:

"This is not cool, Dave."

Thank you Randy. I hope that doesn't move you off Dave's "good guy list" to the other list. It's was a simple reminder that the Golden Rule still needs supporters. Breaking the Golden Rule is not cool.

Thw web cannot endure without it.

Rogers, it still seems like we have far from the whole story. You should probably tell all of it ot none of it. But just trotting it out bit by bit doesn't do anyone much good.

Also, Netcraft shows weblogs.com on Linux/Apache. I wonder if they are still running on Rogers' "worthless" work.

There's not much more I can say that isn't already on my weblog, PWB. Arrington's insinuation that I did something wrong on the Weblogs.Com project is simply false.

VeriSign's definitely using its own code today on Weblogs.Com and never installed mine. I think they only looked at my code to make sure they fully supported the existing API and all of the XML files the old Weblogs.Com offered, including little-used stuff like the RSS changes file.

Cameron, the history does mention netscape. step 2 and 4. I guess you were looking for more.

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