Dave Winer has apologized for -- essentially -- "being mean."

Here's the story. Early this year we had a little -- very little -- community of developers just barely starting to coalesce around the newly opened (open source) Frontier kernel. Unfortunately, nobody from Userland was participating in that effort: they have their own license, and chose to pursue their own development efforts rather than join the open source project. Our changes would exist only in the open source version, and their changes would only be found in their commercial version.

Brian Ablaza asked about bug fixes in the two different versions, and which one he should use. His question was asked on Userland's own message board. Scott Young (the boss at UserLand) responded with a non-answer.

David Gerwitz called him on it. Scott responded to David, but still without really answering the question.

Finally, Scott stopped beating around the bush:

"UserLand will continue to release its own version of Frontier bundled with its products."

David obviously didn't like that answer. Besides his response there, he posted a pointer on the kernel developers mailing list. That's when I involved myself, posting one message to the yahoo group, and two messages to Userland's board.

Dave Winer's response? He called us names. I didn't like that very much, but at least I made my point without losing my temper.

Unfortunately, I believe Dave's insulting tone (there were more messages, as you can see if you follow that thread on the developer's list) squashed the list. Many of us went through this back in the late 90's, and just don't want to do it again. At least, I know I don't.

Now look at the messages posted in the last six weeks. Go back even further if you want. There are spaces, here and there, with very little activity, but generally you can see that things are getting done. Flip was organizing the bug reports, some others (myself include) were fixing bugs and adding some small features. We were starting to self-organize. As you can see, though, things died almost completely after Dave's last messages on February 9 and 10. One very brief discussion of tcp.ftp limitations, and then nothing.

Now he apparently wants us to start all over again. After his apology, he justifies his behavior by saying that we weren't doing what he wanted:

First, I'd like to apologize for using the term "drama queens" to describe the people who were lobbying UserLand to do something related to this project. It was over the top. I'm sorry I said it.

I really want to get something going here, and going back to UserLand was not going to help that. The way to go is to start slowly and get some releases out, improve the kernel in small ways, get some successes under our belt, learn from them, and then do it again.

(Emphasis added.)

Now, it's no secret that Conversant is (still, presently) built on Frontier. I have good reasons for wanting to see something happen with the open source project, so I have good reasons for thinking about what Dave said. He isn't hiding the fact that he wants us to help him, for his sake. He wants his community built around his outliner, which specializes in his file format (OPML) and serves a market he's helping to pioneer (podcasting). Though much of what 'he' wants to do has nothing to do with Conversant, any improvements made to the kernel could also help with Conversant.

On the other hand, there's a lot of history to be considered. If I'm volunteering my time, I definitely don't want to feel like I'm working for Dave.

I haven't decided what to do yet, besides think out loud right here.

For now, I'll continue on the path I've been on for months: working on my own version, privately. Use our fixes and conversant-only features in our non-distributed versions of Conversant. When I do something worth sharing, like these items, I'll certainly continue to share them with the community.

However, it's going to take more than a half-hearted apology (immediately followed by a justfication) to really get me involved again. I can't speak for others, of course... but then, perhaps their silence is speaking for them.