Latest blogging battle is Winer v. Cadenhead

A fight is brewing between Dave Winer, one of the fathers of blogging, and Rogers Cadenhead, a notable Web developer and blog author.

Winer is threatening to sue Cadenhead unless he stops using a software application that Winer claims he developed. Winer also wants Cadenhead to return $5,000 Winer paid Cadenhead to create and manage one of his Web sites.

The dustup follows a successful collaboration between the two. According to a post on Cadenhead's site, Winer paid him $10,000 last year to recode Weblogs.com, a ping service, to an Apache/MySQL/PHP web application running on a Linux server. The switch to LAMP was designed to help manage the site's mushrooming traffic.

Winer, one of the pioneers behind the RSS technology used to distribute Web content, sold Weblogs last October to Verizon for $2.3 million. Afterward, he hired Cadenhead to operate a LAMP-version of Share Your OPML, an RSS subscription site.

Cardenhead completed the work using Winer's applications and the site is still in operation, according to the letter written by Winer's attorney and posted at Cadenhead.org.

Winer wants the money back and for Cadenhead to stop using his applications. Cadenhead says that the applications he used at OPML Factory weren't Winer's proprietary data.

"Winer seems determined to go after anyone he perceives as a threat to his authority over RSS," Cadenhead wrote in his blog. "Even to the point of turning a minor business disagreement into a federal case."

Winer claims it was Cadenhead who insisted on hiring attorneys to settle the matter.

"Now he's apparently changed his mind and wants to try to have his way by starting some kind of flamewar in the blogosphere," wrote Winer on his blog. "This is disappointing, and it won't work, because I insist on being treated fairly."