Good grief. Does he have any friends?
Letter from Dave Winer’s Attorney:
Winer seems determined to go after anyone he perceives as a threat to his authority over RSS, even to the point of turning a minor business disagreement into a federal case (“17 U.S.C. 101, et seq.”).
I don’t have a board of directors or a venture capitalist who can talk me into quitting the RSS Advisory Board. I’m a self-employed stay-at-home dad, and my sons are not persuaded by the argument that the board threatens the RSS roadmap.
But he has succeeded in making me sorry I took his invitation back in 2004 to get involved in RSS, a syndication format that will forever be mired in childish personal animus because of his mistaken belief that allowing other people to contribute to its success will rob him of credit.
The archives of Workbench contain numerous examples of lavish praise I’ve given Winer over the years, including an effort I led among his admirers to pool their funds and buy him a get-well iPod after he underwent heart surgery.
I’ve never been more retroactively embarrassed to have paid someone a compliment in my life.
I always thought he was a little touchy, but read the letter he had sent: you thought the phrase “don’t make a federal case out of it” was a joke, didn’t you?
Not Dave.