1.

In my first piece of 2002, I explained how small companies or individual developers who want to maintain their independence must give away some of their technology so that when the Big's (like Microsoft) have to be compatible. " If you want to profit from your innovative ground-breaking work, you'd better create a big target, and plan in advance for the incursion of the Big's, and make sure when they arrive, their customers know that a standard format or protocol exists."

2.

RSS has now passed that test. As we go forward, today's spec will represent the baseline, the unchanging, compatible core that all content systems, search engines, and news aggregators support. There may be other formats in the future, but they will not be called RSS. They may or may not be authored by the big companies. It won't matter as long as behind it all, the market that RSS defines continues to exist.