Sam Ruby: “Early drafts of the new spec referred to “its predecessorâ€?.  This language was removed, but the version number was bumped. Quite frankly, both are acts of social violence.”

The problem with this RSS war is less about technology and more about respect for and deference to standards, specs, and formal processes for developing these artifacts. Based on what I’ve seen and read, I don’t believe that Dave feels that this kind of formality is important. He’d rather see people collaborate on a goal and ship software without those formal constraints. Sam Ruby on the other hand, and probably Tim Bray to a lesser degree, seem to be much more comfortable with the formality. In fact, I’d be willing to guess that if RSS had been turned over to a formal working group and/or standards committee much earlier that Atom would have never come about.

So a likely question is “Who is right here?” And of course the answer is quite subjective.