MacWrite for the web

Notes prepared by Claude.ai. It makes mistakes, like where it was recorded, but gets the story remarkably well.

A solo Dave Winer podcast, recorded over breakfast in a parking lot in Kingston, NY.

The episode starts with something Dave read from Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, arguing that open source developers have to care for ecosystems, not just their own source code. It landed, because Dave's spent the last couple of years getting close to WordPress and wrestling with a basic question: what is WordPress? Not a company with a single strategy the way Microsoft was in the 90s, where nothing shipped unless it fit the plan. WordPress is many entities at once, and Dave's sense is that the people inside it don't fully see the larger web they live in — which is a missed opportunity, because the web desperately needs building.

From there he gets to the thing that's been gnawing at him: nobody in tech expects breakthroughs anymore. He's a product maker, and what he really makes is opportunities — solutions to problems most people can't even parse, because they're not expecting anything new. He traces this back through his whole career. Outliners, which everyone misremembers as a chore. MORE in 1986, an easy hit because everyone already understood presentations. And a great story about licensing news photos from AP and Agence France-Presse for a Ken Burns–style screensaver of current events — and nobody believing he'd actually gotten the rights. Same disbelief, he notes, that surrounded his New York Times RSS feed, the real catalyst for RSS taking off. He invokes the ice-nine image from Cat's Cradle: once the Times was on board, the rest had to follow.

The emotional core is envy. Listening to Spielberg on The Rewatchables, Dave was struck by how filmmakers share ideas, talent, and each other's projects — and asked why he's never gotten to make his contribution where he's most able, bootstrapping ecosystems, without having to build and run a whole company to earn the seat.

He closes with the pitch: WordLand is the MacWrite of the writer's web — a reference design meant to show developers what a writing tool on this platform looks like, deliberately not trying to be the everything-app that would scare developers off. Underneath it sits wpIdentity, an API that talks to WordPress but isn't bound to it. Get one more implementation and you're on the road to a web standard. The takeaway: open source isn't enough. You have to protect open formats and protocols, use only web protocols, and make every part replaceable — and if you want anyone to believe that, you'd better have already replaced them yourself.

Notes prepared by Claude.ai