NetNewsWire Status: Brent Simmons' Open-Source Retirement Project
Original: NetNewsWire Status
Retired developer Brent Simmons dedicates his post-career time to perfecting NetNewsWire, the open-source RSS reader, free from commercial pressure.
Brent Simmons, creator of NetNewsWire, retired roughly a year ago and has chosen the veteran RSS reader as his sole retirement project. Free from any commercial obligation, he is focused on making the software as good as it can possibly be. Simon Willison calls this approach inspiring, noting he relies on NetNewsWire daily across Mac and iPhone.
Simon Willison's brief but enthusiastic post highlights a status update from Brent Simmons, the longtime developer behind NetNewsWire, one of the most enduring RSS readers in the Mac ecosystem. Willison frames Simmons' situation as genuinely inspiring: a developer who has reached retirement and chosen, of all possible pursuits, to dedicate that freed time to a single piece of software — polishing it to the highest quality achievable, unconstrained by revenue targets, investor timelines, or user-growth metrics.
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