Ouch! He's defintely not happy, but I think there needs to be some more structure around the format. I love using Markdown, but it's annoying finding out what quirks work on different parsers. For example, GitHub supports hyperlinked images, but Designer New's comments don't. I think the spec has too many open ends and needs wrangling. I'm just not sure if this was the best way to go about doing it.
Either way, they're forcing his hand. He's been sitting back while others have been simply trying to get a spec.
If he wants to be grumpy, cool. GH, SO, and Reddit will forge on. If we wants to litigate, cool too; bring it on.
Those 3 communities have large overlapping userbases. This baby is being born, Gruber or not, and nobody will remember in n years about the current kerfuffle.
It's good something like Markdown exists, and it shouldn't have had to flourish despite not having an unambiguous formalized spec.
> If we wants to litigate, cool too; bring it on.
He's got nothing to litigate about. The trademark claim on "Markdown" had no place in his copyright license, nor does that copyright license affect this specifications project in any meaningful way (because they don't use the copyrighted work).
That's why the only valid argument so far has been over the implications of the word "Standard" in "Standard Markdown" being a "dick move" (which is a personal POV, which is fine, which I also happen to disagree with).
And how would that work? Let's assume I wrote BrainFuckStandardMD, the implementation for Brainfuck. I would base it solely on the spec published as Common Markdown. I would not in any way use the copyrighted code as basis for my implementation, so it is not derived from it. I don't use the name markdown, so that even the ficticious claim to a trademark would be void. On what grounds would he sue me?
I don't disagree. I think they shouldn't have called it "Standard Markdown", though, as that's appropriating it. "Community-flavoured Markdown" or something would be far better.
I don't think having a standard will in any way reduce the variance of implementations and which implementations (custom or otherwise) sites choose to use. Some wont want to support images. Some won't want to support inline html.
