This weekend, Jason Calacanis discovered that NewsGator was putting ads alongside their full content RSS feeds in NewsGator online. He says his full content feeds are for "non-commercial use ONLY" and that they "DO NOT ALLOW ADVERTISING AGAINST OUR *FULL* RSS FEEDS." Greg Reinacker, founder of NewsGator, in pure blogospheric form responded by bending over and greasing up. Jason followed up.
Links
- http://www.calacanis.com/2006/10/22/newsgator-is-not-stealing-our-content/
- http://www.rassoc.com/gregr/weblog/archive.aspx?post=818
- http://www.calacanis.com/2006/10/24/newsgator-says-they-will-do-the-right-thing-or-feedburner-t/
I've got a couple points to add. FeedDemon is commercial software and uses Jason's feeds. Ads are one form of commercialization of software. Selling a product is another. There's a lot of software that seems to be violating Jason's guidelines. Why isn't he complaining about them? Actually, he is.
He was upset that I was sending full-content Weblogsinc blog posts in Rmail and told me as much. I asked him for an OPML of Weblogsinc blog posts so that I could correct the problem. He followed up that what I was doing was not a problem. I wonder, had Greg not responded with BOGU, would Jason have backed off?
Thanks,
Randy