Slug: goodbye-userland Date: 2010-01-20 Title: Goodbye, UserLand. layout: post

For several years, from about 1996 to 1999, Dave Winer and UserLand Software were a huge portion of my daily life. I was creating websites and scripting tools in Frontier, reading Davenet, Scripting News, the frontier users’ mailing lists. I’m pretty sure I dreamt in usertalk a few times, and I was well indoctrinated with the culture of outlining.

Dave writes today about the final resolution of what remains of UserLand.

It’s been a very long ride, but I think finally it’s coming to an end. UserLand Software was founded 22 years ago, with the goal of opening up applications to be programmed by users. We didn’t fully achieve that goal, but like many other things in life, the goal we did achieve was even more interesting.

Dave, along with former UserLander Jake Savin, is working to make sure that all the old archives from radio.userland.com are saved, as are the Radio and Manila and usertalk docs. I’m so glad this this part of UserLand and Frontier’s history is being preserved. Thankfully the code has already been preserved in open source form via the frontier kernel project and in product form in Dave’s OPML Editor (an app that runs on the Frontier kernel).

While I’ve long since moved on from the Frontier community and tools, I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for the software the the amazing people that made it what it was. I won’t remember everyone, but special thanks to Dave, Brent, André and Jake, and the many members of the community that made those years so special.