Dave Winer moved the RSS 2.0 spec from Userland to the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. It is now licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike license. There is now an advisory board.
[...]
I think we should call a cease-fire at this point...
- Dan Gillmor: RSS Moves a Step Forward
- Jon Udell: An announcement about RSS
- Brent Simmons: RSS Spec Moves to Berkman, Advisory Board Formed.
Brent is the author of the news aggregator NetNewsWire, and answers on that post the question of supporting other formats:
Do you still plan to support Echo (now Atom) when it's ready?
Yes.
Being a member of the RSS advisory board doesn't mean that now I'm a soldier in a war. I advocate and support RSS -- but my software will support other formats too.
Atom (formerly known as N-echo, formerly known as Echo, formerly known as Pie) is a project to create a common syntax for syndication, archiving and publishing an API for weblogs. If the Wiki is too hard to swallow, you can follow the project from this weblog. The motivation for Atom specifically states that Dave Winer has a too tight hold on RSS that made this spec "untouchable". In the new situation he still has a share on it but along with two other people (initially Jon Udell and Brent Simmons, cited above) who will decide with a majority vote. It is not clear yet how this move will impact Atom, which scope is much more than re-doing RSS and which now becomes free to reuse the RSS 2.0 format according to its new Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.