[uf-new] XFN - Professionals Network microformat

[Manu Sporny]

Guy Fraser wrote:
> 6. Summary...
> 
> With the licensing, patenting and conflicting versions of the same
> things are making me *very* hesitant to get involved.

Hi Guy,

I can definitely sympathize with your viewpoints. I don't think the
licensing and patenting is a concern, read on...

> When I was told about uF's, they were presented to me by friends as a
> community of developers coming up with ways to descrive things using
> semantically correct markup in a human friendly format. However, I'm
> getting an increasingly strong feeling of an environment which is very
> restrictive and divergent.

I'll be blunt: every community has a group of jerks and a group of
people that actually get the work done. While people may seem to be
jerk-ish on the list, most of them have good intentions.

I had the same problems with the "process" as you are having.
Information is ridiculously hard to find, how the licensing is going to
work out isn't particularly straightforward, and some of the community
tends to be very brusque in their replies.

The only real input I have to your statements are:

 - We need people to get the information in a more digestable manner -
   I'm thinking of putting something together in the next month or two.
 - Licensing is going to have to work out - most drafts have the intent
   of the authors in a section titled "Copyright":
   http://microformats.org/wiki/audio-info-proposal#Copyright
 - Ignore the jerks and do good work. The great thing about this
   nebulous "Microformats process" is that once you have a good number
   of examples - nobody can deny your points.

I feel your pain... but, there is a great deal of good to be found in
this community.

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny
President/CEO, Digital Bazaar, Inc.
http://blog.digitalbazaar.com/