Robb leaves Userland

News from Dave Winer about the CEO etc etc of Userland :

Some news: John Robb is leaving UserLand. This is part of a bigger transition, one that we're not ready to talk about yet. It should be, net-net, good news for Manila and Radio users, and for the weblog community. We weren't ready to announce, John surprised us by writing about his departure on his weblog. He's a surprising guy. Anyway, part of my reason for being in Calif next week is business. I think UserLand will do fine, although things are still uncertain, but that's life in the big leagues. Thanks John for all your help, and best wishes to you and your family for much continued success. Onward!

There's now an empty Apache directory at http://jrobb.userland.com/ (one of his recent posts claimed that Sam Ruby was being directed by IBM to do the Echo project - there was no apparent retraction despite Sam's denial). I'm sure he'll be blogging again soon.

Paolo makes a slightly cryptic sideways reference to sales.

Also of interest to syndicators and feeders everywhere : Dave is asking "hypothetically" Which Creative Commons license? for the RSS 2.0 spec.
If you look at the Creative Commons site, to choose an appropriate license is a matter of clicking on three radio buttons, so presumably this question isn't being asked for technical or legal reasons...

btw, I thought Dave worked for Harvard now...so who's the we he refers to above? Dave is member of the Userland board (thanks for the clarification).

Comments

[Liz]

Yes, the three buttons comment was priceless. I too wonder, especially in light of a longer version of his post which talked about getting a team together to do sales and giving incentives, etc. that disappeared within 10 minutes of going up.

[Dave Winer]

FYI, I'm a board member at UserLand. That's what "we" means.

Also, I'm irony-deprived. What does the bit about three radio buttons mean?

To Liz, I decided to take some more time to write that bit. It was a bit of a scramble yesterday, as I explained.

I look forward to reading this blog, and hope it's objective in covering the Echo project. I saw a need, from the beginning, for a weblog. After all, the project is about weblogs, right?

[Danny]

Hi Dave, thanks for the clarification (I'll modify the post accordingly).

I (and I think Liz too) found it noteworthy that you were asking for help in selecting a license when the Creative Commons just has three simple radio buttons and plain English to allow you to choose. The only difficult part would be in deciding what you want - and that's entirely your call. (btw, I suspect Attribution-NoDerivs is probably closer to the intention of the current, so no-one could duplicate the page and e.g. say "unfrozen").

Thanks for the positive words, and I'll certainly try and report objectively (note the references to XML-RPC in the Recent Changes post - this is something I think would be a really bad idea in this context, but I've tried to reflect what's being said).

In my not so humble opinion, the project is about a lot more than just weblogs, though I definitely agree it needs one of its own.

[xian]

Dave has also stated that he is still a large shareholder in UserLand. Say, in your blogroll you might want to give Dave props for OPML too.