David Bayly posts at least a dozen bug reports to the Frontier-Users list and Dave Winer threatens to kick him off.

This pathetic customer service behaviour is just a sample of the many reasons nearly all of the best Frontier developers from the last 5 years have moved to or are in the process of moving to greener pastures, and just about no software is released for Frontier anymore. There is no community anymore, just a group of powerless users who can't get bugs fixed unless they say "pretty please with a cherry on top oh great leader".

Someone should put a muzzle on that guy. I've never seen such a self-destructive "leader".

(BTW, I'm not the only one who can't understand Winer's reaction)

How many companies threaten to sue a group of enthusiasts that start a community resource site? Well Winer threatened a group of other people in 1998 for starting www.FrontierUsers.Net. The site had to change its name to scriptmeridian.org and redesign. UserLand claimed they had trademarks they clearly don't own, but since they have more money than the group of Frontier fans (of which I was one), the name change was the safest thing to do.

Can you imagine if Apple threatened to sue Applesurf or Macintouch, or Microsoft threatened to sue 15seconds, not for particular content, but simply for trying to provide a service to a community of users?

Since Frontier was free at the time, it was really more like Linus threatening to sue Freshmeat or Linux News Weekly.

What a jerk. Why anyone continues to support that company is beyond me. I love the core software, but it's in the wrong hands. (no disrespect intended to UserLand's great employees, who are all very pleasant to deal with and very hard working)