The RSS Version 2.0 specification originally developed and maintained by Userland's Dave Winer has been transferred to the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, and has been republished under the of the Attribution/Share Alike Creative Commons license. Under the Attribution/Share Alike license, "The licensor permits others to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work; in return, licensees must give the original author credit. The licensor also permits others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the one that governs the licensor's work." RSS ('Really Simple Syndication' or 'RDF Site Summary') has been issued in at least seven versions, by different informally constituted groups. Despite the lack of convergence, RSS is rapidly gaining in popularity as a news syndication format. At the same time, new syndication formats are being proposed, including a front-runner documented on the Intertwingly.net (Pie/Echo/Atom) project wiki. This promising initiative has completed several key specifications as it seeks to "develop a common syntax for syndicating, archiving and editing episodic web sites."

RSS might stand for "Rich Site Summary," "RDF Site Summary," "Really Simple Syndication," or something else, depending upon your point of view. The two major variants include an RDF-based XML specification (RSS version 0.9, 1.0) and a non-RDF XML specification (RSS versions 0.91, 0.92, 0.93, 0.94, 2.0). From the version 1.0 specification abstract: "RDF Site Summary (RSS) is a lightweight multipurpose extensible metadata description and syndication format. RSS is an XML application, conforms to the W3C's RDF Specification and is extensible via XML-namespace and/or RDF based modularization." From the IETF Internet-Draft 'draft-nottingham-rss-media-type-00' (RSS 2.0): "RSS is a lightweight, multipurpose, extensible metadata description and syndication format. RSS is an XML application. RSS is currently used for a number of applications, including news and other headline syndication, weblog syndication, and the propogation of software update lists. It is generally used for any situation when a machine-readable list of textual items and/or metadata about them needs to be distributed. There are a number of revisions of the RSS format defined, many of which are actively used..."

[TBD]