Dave Winer is a brilliant, high-profile software/standards developer and Big Thinker who pontificates about this and that in his DaveNet blog and keeps track of the geeky world of scripting (as it relates to Web development) and more in his Scripting News blog. Winer is a dyed-in-the-wool commercial software developer: His company produces and sells the popular (and powerful) Radio Userland desktop blogging software. I tend not to give Winer as much credit as he probably deserves because — and this should be no surprise given his mode of making a living — he is hostile to the Open Source and Free Software movements, and has been known to badmouth both with red herrings and false premises. Winer likes open standards, but not Open Source. Pity.

He really does understand the power of the Web, though, and more specifically, the emerging power of Weblogs. His latest missive ties together the fall of Napster and the rise of blogs, and contains the most concise description I’ve yet seen of where I think the ‘net is headed:

One day, and that day is coming soon, a creative artist will use the weblog world to distribute a musical meme, good music, a catchy tune, and then sell a CD with a high-res scan of the same music, and that will undermine the smelly assholes and their cronies, forever. Say goodbye.