I have been considering using a separate library for generating the RSS and Atom feeds in Subtext. My first thought was to use RSS.NET but I noticed that there seemed to be no recent activity.
I contacted the admin and found out that RSS.NET has been bought by ToolButton Inc and will be released as a product. Very cool!
In the meanwhile, I still need an open source RSS library to package up with Subtext. Fortunately, RSS.NET was developed under the MIT license which, as I mentioned before, is very compatible with our BSD license.
So one option is to simply copy the code into our Subtext code base. My only qualm about this approach is that I would like to keep stand-alone libraries that are not central to the Subtext Domain out of the Subtext codebase as much as possible, preferring to reference them as an external library.
Ideally, I would like to start a new project that is essentially a fork in RSS.NET, perhaps called FeedGenerator.NET (call me the forkmaster). I could probably host it on CodePlex in order to give me an opportunity to try it out and provide feedback. Would anyone find such a library useful other than us blog engine developers? Anyone have a better name?
I probably wouldn’t spend much time on this project except to provide changes and bug fixes as needed by Subtext. It would by no means be intended to compete with Web 2.0 Tools products, since they are probably going to be much more full featured than our humble needs. Besides, under the MIT license, any improvements we make would be available for them to roll into their product (following the terms of the license of course). It is the beauty of the MIT and BSD licenses.
Any thoughts? Suggestion? Etc...?