The fact that this whole charade is over one word "standard" because it seemingly takes control away from Gruber rubs me the wrong way.
Jeff Atwood and co have done nothing but praise Markdown. They've worked really hard to flesh out a starting point for a standardized Markdown implementation. I think the word they chose, "Standard" makes perfect sense here.
Instead, both John Gruber and Marco Arment are acting super immature about the whole situation. Reading their Tweets today I keep imagining them stomping their feet on the ground because someone did something they didn't approve of.
I don't mean to add fuel to any fire, but I really think we shouldn't be validating their overly-dramatic behavior. I'm sure that Gruber could have politely sent Atwood an email or even public tweet asking that his project reconsider a better name, maybe even calling it something like "Rockdown." From everything I've read so far, Atwood seemed to want Gruber on board but got crickets instead.
I'm with Gruber and Arment on this. It's really simple. Markdown is Gruber's name. So he's the only one with the authority to say what "standard Markdown" is. Atwood and company should just rename their spec and be done with it.
EDIT: To be really classy, after the rename, redirect standardmarkdown.com to Gruber's Markdown home page.
I agree they should rename, and after they rename, no one will give a crap about Markdown anymore.
Remember Hudson? Maybe you've heard of Jenkins? Exactly.
All the big players who make use of Markdown are on board with this. If they all adopt this "standard" whatever it's called, it will effectively spell the end of mass usage of "Markdown" as it stands now.
That's why this keruffle is so stupid. Then again, renaming will take away the attention from the stupid yelling over the name, so maybe they should just do it and deprive them of it. Call it Sparkdown or Harkdown or something so the connection is still apparent and move on.
I'm not sure RSS vs. Atom is a good comparison. As far I understood it, Atom was created to address the limitations in RSS with a fresh approach, not simply to further refine behavior in a loosely specified format.
And while I'm aware he wants them to do their thing with a new name (an argument I can agree with for sure), I think he'd probably still complain about a connective name (e.g., Sparkdown). I don't know for sure, but given his posture to this whole thing throughout the process, it seems likely. At that point, though, I think they could justifiably just give him the proverbial finger. :)
EDIT: Turns out I was wrong. He gave them a list of similar names (with Markdown in them no less!) in a recent e-mail.
> Markdown is Gruber's name. So he's the only one with the authority to say what "standard Markdown" is.
Except when "X" is legally a trademark, its not uncommon for "Standard X" to be defined by an entity independent of the creator "X" without needing approval from the creator of "X".
Where "X" is a trademark (e.g., "JavaScript"), things are a little different, but I don't see a convincing argument that Markdown is Gruber's trademark.
> he's the only one with the authority to say what "standard Markdown" is
And he utterly refuses to do anything to actually improve the clarity of the original document and make it easier and more obvious to determine how parsers should behave.
> Atwood and company should just rename their spec and be done with it.
It's kind of upsetting that they didn't. If they'd chosen another name, there'd have been no controversy.
What really kills me is that Gruber, Arment, and other ranters in that clique (e.g. some well-known tech journalists) have attached themselves to a larger design-driven philosophy. A pillar of this includes the notion of "it just works". Now, looking at the real-world problems that standardization efforts are aiming for, we have:
1. Markdown had a design and ecosystem which largely let it win an overwhelming majority of mindshare against other lightweight markup contenders.
2. As the ecosystem of websites, apps, and users of Markdown has grown so has the desire to have Markdown participate in workflow with a lifecycle outside of more than one app. In all likelihood that means there's more than one Markdown backend involved.
While Markdown may be "done", it no longer completely "just works". This brings us to:
3. As multiple different standards efforts[1] have said, they'd like to solve the interoperability issue for their apps and Markdown's users. So, that generally means a standard.
Markdown has been a de facto success with wide adoption. This creates a sense of community ownership. I'm unclear as to what's really going on with @gruber, but I can't wrap my head around his apparent failure to sensibly interact with the community around Markdown that wants to address these issues. Even if that interaction were just "I don't want any. Please rename and fork." (EDIT: apparently that has in fact been said[2].)
[1] At least: the W3C group (now defunct) and Standard Markdown.
> The fact that this whole charade is over one word "standard"
There are only two words and you picked the wrong one. The issue is about the word (and apparently, trademark) "Markdown". They can call it "Standard Rockdown" if they want.
> I'm sure that Gruber could have politely sent
Come on. Gruber said he didn't want people to use the name and instead they should create their own flavor with their own name.
How would you like it if someone else decided to take your Project/creation's name without your permission (and explicitly against your license), make extensions to it and call it the new "Standard"?
> From everything I've read so far, Atwood seemed to want Gruber on board but got crickets instead.
Also don't see how an invitation to the original Author to join your new initiative should legitimize it in anyway.
I think it's worth noting that TeX was standardized and frozen by Knuth (at version 3.14159...). I recall that Knuth wrote that it was important to have a documentation format that didn't drift over time so that in the future TeX would properly process documents written many years before.
Knuth also protected the name TeX. There have been a number of important packages that run on top of TeX, for example LaTeX and ConText and even enhanced implementations of TeX itself, like LuaTeX, pdftex, and xetex; however, only Knuth's TeX can be called "TeX".
It seems that this has worked out for TeX, something similar could be done for Markdown.
"TeX" is literally a substring of "LaTeX", just like "Markdown" is a substring of "Standard Markdown".
Further, I don't really want to write TeX. I want to write LaTeX, and only care about a PDF output, which isn't what the original TeX program specializes in at all.
Standard Markdown is a breath of fresh air that ensures the continued success of Markdown, just like LaTeX did for TeX. Of course, only a few websites have adopted it for now, but I would not be flabbergasted if I started seeing more websites adopt it.
I don't think Knuth would be happy with "Standard TeX".
In my mind, the problematic part is of "Standard Markdown" is "Standard", not the composition of "X Markdown". "Standard Markdown" makes it the real Markdown for most people, and that is the problem, that it feels like you're trying to steal the work from the original author, not build on it.
Exactly, I don't understand people making the argument that a project is abandonned because it doesn't evolve, I think that Gruber thinks it's a feature. I also understand why another group of people would want to make evolve and extend this work I think it's fair. But what I don't get is this offensive naming Standard Markdown it is somewhat made to make look Markdown deprecated, old, instead of simply communicating on the idea that it is a different project originally based on Markdown but oriented in a different direction. Worst of all I think this naming was choosen on purpose.
> that a project is abandonned because it doesn't evolve
While I wouldn't say that a project is abandoned, I would say that a project is broken if it's a file format that has many ambiguities in the spec, and bug reports to the author/maintainer are all marked as WONTFIX. I really wouldn't describe that situation as "doesn't evolve" either.
Yes, but for instance sometimes in my open source projects I disagree with the philosophy or with the purpose of a patch and I mark it WONTFIX, I feel bad because I don't want to offense people that take the time to contribute, but above all I don't want to mess-up with my project so I don't commit the patch. At the end of the day I think you're the creator of the project, you have a vision, you are the editor and you must not feel bad about it. And after all, if people disagree, they fork it and make it their own project with their own name. But calling it abandonned or bad stewardship is simply wrong.
When you make something, and publish it with the intent that it is used by others, then you can't turn around and decide that any/all criticism is unfair.
Take the Linux kernel for example. If Linus Torvalds decides to abandon all support for architectures other than MIPS in the Linux kernel, would you not consider it fair game to criticize his stewardship of the Linux kernel? Or is all criticism silenced by, "well, it's my project so I can do whatever I want to do?"
This is also a little more ambiguous because Markdown is a loose file format spec rather than a project with "actual" code, so no one is really "submitting patches."
> When you make something, and publish it with the intent that it is used by others, then you can't turn around and decide that any/all criticism is unfair.
He doesn't say that, I don't say that, he says that it doesn't fit with his vision.
> Take the Linux kernel for example. If Linus Torvalds decides to abandon all support for architectures other than MIPS in the Linux kernel, would you not consider it fair game to criticize his stewardship of the Linux kernel? Or is all criticism silenced by, "well, it's my project so I can do whatever I want to do?"
Non sequitur. He didn't remove nothing, he created a syntax, he said that he is more attached to it than to its eventual ambiguities and therefore consider his job done. That's not bad stewardship it's simply having an opinion, a vision. And I repeat if people disagree they fork and use their own name as long it doesn't bother Gruber. And to keep your example of Linus Torvalds, you can check, he owns the name Linux because it originally was his project so he might enforce his rights as he sees fit.
> And to keep your example of Linus Torvalds, you can check, he owns the name Linux because it originally was his project.
There are many long-standing forks of the Linux kernel that don't change all of the source code to remove the name "Linux". I don't see Linus pitching a fit over them.
> And I repeat if people disagree they fork and use their own name.
People have forked it (e.g. MultiMarkdown, Github flavored Markdown), and Gruber hasn't complained about them (at least not publicly).
Not true, actually, I believe he's made allowances for other implementations to be called that IFF they implement it correctly. I still believe it's controlled by him, but it's not a completely frozen name.
tex, unlike gruber's markdown, is both maintained and has a turing complete language inside it. I don't think gruber's markdown is a good core for anything. Rather, people really like the idea, and have been filling in missing features along the way.
It's even less about missing features than about bringing some sanity to the ambiguities in the few features that Markdown has. Markdown doesn't even do a good job of spec'ing the few features that it does have.
What do you do when the founder of a project becomes an impediment to its progress? Gruber is clearly the creator and popularizer of Markdown. OTOH, he's been uninvolved in anything related to it for years (AFAICT).
The corollary to this question is to what degree the founder of a project "owns" aspects of the project (code, name, etc.) after they drop out. I'm not asking about legal ownership but rather moral ownership.
You unequivocally do not use the creator's project name.
Look at the MySQL bifurcation. We don't have "MySQL++" by Percona and "MySQL Redux" by Monty — we have entirely new names. We don't see companies going around calling themselves "MySQL Labs" just to co-opt the good will of a pre-existing name. Oracle would sue the name infringers into the stoneage (temporal lawsuit warfare; very advanced move).
Now, I doubt teh groobz will lawyer up and smack down (unlike Oracle), but if you are creating something new using a pre-existing name just so you can exploit existing popularity you didn't create yourself... that's just a dick move.
Are Atwood et al. calling it "Standard Markdown" because they don't have enough of their own popularity, and feel the need to appropriate someone else's decade-old coolness in order to be recognized as significant people because they can't accomplish that in their own right?
Or are Atwood et al. calling it "Standard Markdown" because they know quite well that, given the massive proliferation of Markdown varieties all of which use the name "Markdown", naming it anything else essentially guarantees that because no one will ever hear of their effort, and therefore no developers will ever use their standardized variant, no matter how much less painful doing so would be for them and their users?
If they called it "Syntaxx, a flavor of Markdown that 9 organizations agree to support to enable text markup interop," that would be okay. Just like how "PerconaDB" is "PerconaDB, a mysql fork that's still protocol compatible with additional performance improvements."
> The words "Standard Markdown" sound like it is the standard from the owners of the Markdown.
"Standard X" sounds a lot more to me to be "what a an interested committee did to X after it became popular and multiple different implementations of X existed, quite likely with only a distant, if any, connection to the creator of X".
I mean, if someone says "Standard Pascal" or "Standard SQL", or "Standard HTML", I don't assume it came from the inventors of those technologies.
Except we are computer scientists and there is no BNF grammar (or what have you) for the language. We all know we can do better than that. I'm just shocked this omission went for so long without anyone noticing--it's a big freaking deal.
Formalization of a grammar isn't "design by committee" (and in any case, this work in particular certainly was not). Formalization sets a logical, mathematical foundation for something that has thus far been a rather back-of-the-napkin, cowboy coded, cargo cult kind of thing. Could you name all the terminals before? I couldn't.
Markdown is implemented in hundreds of places (conservative guess). Discounting marked deviations and well-known dialects, it is a nontrivial task to ascertain whether a given Markdown implementation will produce the "correct output". What is correct output? Our ability to express or ascertain that is complicated by the fact that some rather archaic perl code [1] somehow holds the dubious distinction of being the de facto standard reference point for Markdown. Perhaps it was chosen as such on account of being the first mover, but probably its because nobody else had spoken up yet. (We're playing catch up now.)
"Implementation defines the standard" is a poor substitute for formality and is the result of intellectual laziness. (Hello PHP prior to HHVM.)
How did any of us effectively communicate what we thought correct meant? I feel a lot of our consensus was arrived at by enumerating all the examples and complex edge cases we could think of. (There's an idea that'll cover all the bases, yet it still maintains the niceties of being wonderfully concise!)
A formal grammar, as it turns out, is rather usually concise by nature (at least for the types of languages we care to design). To the attentive and deliberate thinker, a grammar's rules can be beautiful. A random mental walk through a complex repeating parse tree fills the mind all at once with intracate patterns and possibility. These are structures you can truly grok. With just pen and paper, or a standard text editor, you can easily define how the edges and vertices of an arbitrarily complex, infinite graph can connect. It's really kind of special, and definitely cerebral.
So now that we have a Markdown grammar to look to, libraries now have an easy model for attaining consensus agreement.
Nobody is going to force anyone to change their current implementation or preference. If you like the one you've got, that's perfectly valid state to be in. If your only objection to the new formalization is because it was named the so-called "standard grammar," it's just a name. A silly old case of primate chest pounding, at that. Great ape problems.
Despite all the drama, this spec will probably not be the final end-all, be-all of 80 character wide expression. I can picture infinitely many such grammars, each one being just a little more absurdly named than its predecessor. Nothing is stopping you from forking "standard markdown" and calling it MarkyMark or something.
I still can't believe none of us ever noticed there wasn't a grammar for this. Especially given we communicated all of it through bloated Perl code shared from a zip file.
Has Gruber opined on Seibel's (IMHO good) idea? If he claims he'd be OK with "Common Markdown", I'll have to revise my opinion of him in a much more favorable direction. (And, amusingly, Common Lisp is itself a standard, so perhaps "Common Markdown" would be enough to satisfy everyone.)
If they called it "Syntaxx, [twenty more words that no one cares about]", no one will hear of it, and no one will use it. The words around "Markdown" might be negotiable; the presence of "Markdown" itself makes or breaks the viability of the project as a whole -- without that, Atwood et al. might as well not bother.
This is real simple. You don’t get to appropriate the name just because you wanna. Maybe legally you can under some circumstances, but ethically it’s completely and utterly bankrupt. I cannot even fathom how anyone could even get the idea to appropriate the name and the project in that way. It shows a complete lack of respect and decency.
Naming it something different is very simple. Really, very simple.
I think it's way more complicated than you're making it sound.
So, these things happened:
- Gruber announces Markdown, and releases an implementation in Ruby and some basic documentation
- Someone ports Markdown to a different language. -> is it okay to call it Markdown?
- Said implementation differs from the original implementation in some minor ways, although it still matches the documentation (which is vague enough). This might not even be intentional; it wouldn't be the first time any software has had bugs. Or it might be intentional fixes of actual bugs in the original Ruby implementation of Markdown. -> is it okay to call it Markdown?
- Other people port Markdown to other languages. Said ports become more popular than the original Ruby implementation, such that pretty very few people who claim to use "Markdown" have actually used said original Ruby implementation. These ports are all subtly different from each other, although they still match the documentation (which is vague enough).
- A bunch of people decide to create better documentation (since said original documentation has been vague enough to cause problems with interoperability) -> is it okay to call it Markdown?
After answering these questions, I'd encourage you to replace "Markdown" with "HTML", and imagine how that originally went down.
I’ll grant you that if this were named Something Markdown it would be much, much more subtle. But it’s Standard Markdown FFS. That’s definitely not ok.
Again, I'd encourage you to replace "Markdown" with "HTML" and imagine if your beliefs would still be consistent.
Do you think NetScape should have claimed to support "NetScape-flavored HTML" rather than "HTML"? Do you think the WHATWG should have announced "WHATWG-flavored HTML" rather than "HTML5" in response to lack of action from the W3C (actually a very similar situation to what happened here).
In the modern realm of scripting-is-programming and "startups must win at all costs, damn the ethics" mindsets, people just act as greedily as they can until a larger (monetary) entity gets tired of being exploited and begins causing (monetary) pain down upon the exploiters.
Yeah, but Gruber is apparently upset about standard markdown, but not about the other dozen uses of markdown all over the place. It's a bit late to get upset about calling things X Markdown. If it where a trademark, I think he'd lose it, because they have to be actively defended.
Because Standard Markdown implies something that MultiMarkdown and Github Flavored Markdown don't: That it is the One True Markdown.
People are acting like Atwood and company are just trying to bring a little sanity to the project when it seems pretty clear (to me anyway) that it's really much closer to usurping the project entirely away from Gruber.
> Because Standard Markdown implies something that MultiMarkdown and Github Flavored Markdown don't: That it is the One True Markdown.
In computing,"Standard X" almost never means "The One True X", it generally means "the variant of X that implementations claiming to support Standard X are at least making some gestures in the direction of supporting, but which many of them still won't completely and which, for many practical uses, you'll need to go beyond anyway in manners specific to your application and the particular implementation you are using."
I bet money he'd have a similar problem with any widely adopted markdown replacement that was X Markdown. You may disagree. Note in his tweets he specifically calls out different syntax with the same name, but that feature is common to virtually all X Markdowns.
Further, he has dumped the project and appears to be completely uninterested in fixing, enhancing, or otherwise having much to do with it besides twitter spats.
This is exactly the question I have. And I almost think Gruber acknowledges this, and would possibly otherwise be tolerant (maybe even supportive) of this initiative had it been given another name.
However, I also question the success of this initiative had it been given another "flavor" name.
This has happened a few times. Usually, someone ends up forking the project. The funny thing about forks is that it can go either way. Either the founder gets kicked out and forks the project or someone within the project gets angry and forks the project.
The canonical example would probably be the NetBSD/OpenBSD split (by Theo de Raadt) or the emacs/xemacs split. Or the vim/neovim split.
> However, Standard Markdown does violate MD’s BSD license:
> Neither the name “Markdown” nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.
> So does MultiMarkdown. So does Github Flavored Markdown.
This is what I don't understand about this uproar. The word "markdown" has been used in multiple products and offshoots from Markdown, and no one has said a peep. What makes "Standard Markdown" different from the existing products?
"Comment Markdown"? "Code flavored Markdown"? "Startup Flavored Markdown"? "Startup Markdown"? "Standard Flavored Markdown"? "A Standardized Implementation of Markdown"? "Specced Markdown"? "The Standard Dialect of Markdown"? Are any of these acceptable?
Why do these folks, alone, need to remove the word "markdown" from their name? And is it specifically the word "Standard", or perhaps the lack of a "flavored"-type word, that is grinding gears?
Apparently (at least some) people are claiming that it's the "Standard" that is 'offensive,' and not "Markdown." It just seems like a case-study in splitting hairs though. The real issue boils down to:
1. This is a project designed to become the new Markdown spec, thereby wrestling control of "Markdown" from Gruber.
2. This project was developed in-concert with most of the big sites that use Markdown (StackExchange, Reddit, Github), and therefore has enough weight behind it to push it as the defacto standard.
3. The name "Standard Markdown" is generic enough to possibly cause brand-confusion whereas "MultiMarkdown" and "Github Flavored Markdown" come off as offshoots of The Original Markdown(tm).
Personally, I think that Gruber's mostly upset that this has the potential to become the defacto Markdown while still using Markdown in the name. If (e.g.) MultiMarkdown was in a similar position, he would probably be pitching the same fit.
[ I really don't like the name "Standard Markdown" in general. I prefer a suggestion I saw elsewhere, "Common Markdown." ]
> And is it specifically the word "Standard", or perhaps the lack of a "flavored"-type word, that is grinding gears?
I think this is it. I think Gruber sees "Standard" as implying ownership or original or universal [1]. I think naming it another "flavor" would have been completely fine with him [2] [3].
The BSD license argument (it was also brought up in the other discussion) seems a little bit strange. Markdown.pl, the perl script is BSD licensed, but the markdown specification (if it existed) isn't BSD licensed.
Not that I really care, and sure I don't think that discussing licenses and stuff can be valid or meaningful whatsoever, but I understand why somebody can think of it as a problem and why they can tell a difference between "Github flavored Markdown" and "Standard Markdown". First off, I'm quite sure that if you own some rights on something called "Markdown" and you wan't to abuse somebody, who uses name of your product as part of their own product, then in a battle of lawyers and all these nasty things you can do so, because ultimately it's your right to do so. You invented this stuff and in the license you chose for it it's clearly stated that you don't want somebody else to use its name. So the reason nobody tries to sue somebody for it is that nobody really cares. We are all normal people, not some lawyers after all. If somebody uses name of my product without my written permission, but I don't think it's done with bad intentions and it doesn't hurt me — why should I care? It's like we are living in a slightly more friendly world than all these people in corporations.
So both product names derived from "Markdown" may break some permissions, but only one of them makes somebody care of it. So what's the difference between them? I find it pretty understandable. Say you invented ice-cream and you have the same careless approach to use of its name. It's "Open source product". It becomes popular. So when some guy starts making "cherry ice-cream" you don't think it's bad — it's not the same product that you make, but it clearly resembles it, so people understand what they are going to consume. And you don't mind it, such a nice guy you are. Some other guy living in Hampshire starts selling stuff that he names "Hampshire ice-cream", which you can think is also ok. After all it's pretty natural, to call "ice-cream" something, that very much resembles that very stuff widely known as "ice-cream", but his ice-cream might be somewhat different from yours so it's fine to give it distinctive name.
But then somebody starts making one of his own, which he calls "Real Ice-cream". It's also "Open Source" but its recipe is very detailed and everything that doesn't comply it cannot be called "Real Ice-cream". But "real" isn't only name of his product, it's some natural word and from now on it's implying that every other ice-cream recipe in the world — including your own, the original one — isn't "real".
With "Standard Markdown" it's even worse, as "standard" is pretty clear word in the tech-world. And now when some bunch of guys try to "standartize" something that isn't ultimately their it's only natural that somebody doesn't like it. It's not like markdown is born yesterday, it's widely known thing and it has nothing to do with all these ambitious guys like codinghorror. If you wrote your own markdown compiler it was just some markdown compiler. You like how it works, maybe somebody likes it too, you don't really want to change anything. But from now on it's some non-standard markdown compiler. Must be pretty offensive for somebody.
Is anyone actually arguing that that no one should ever write a specification? Everything I've seen has been about the co-opting of the name. That seems to be Gruber's issue:
Marco: What if they just make their own thing,
give it their own name, and see if it catches on?
[Gruber]: Exactly!
I would love for markdown to be in more places, and work the same everywhere. Standard Markdown is a darn good name to use for that, and while Gruber is sometimes right, he is definitely hit and miss (and with gathering together all the ways to add tables to Markdown, and picking one and adding it to the "spec" on his site, he missed.)
All this fuss over a name. A name that the purported owner hasn't enforced before. A name that's been used by hundreds of other projects. A name that's been thoroughly genericized, and is descriptive of the project.
I can see why Gruber is upset, but why does anybody else feel the need to be upset for him?
From what I've gathered, the only thing Gruber is upset about is the name "Standard" Markdown. I don't think he cares if there is some kind of body that has some kind of standards thing. I'd bet that if the "Standard Markdown" people called it something else and even kept the exact same syntax, he'd be fine with it.
I asked Gruber specifically whether he approved, and he was VERY clear, he did not. It's therefore a dick move, period end. Voting me down doesn't change the fact that it's a dick move. The reason the team wants to use the Markdown name is because of the currency behind it. It's Gruber's currency.
When I first encountered Markdown, almost a decade ago, I loved it. To say that I now hate it would be going a little bit far, but only a little; I'm awfully close to that.
This change in opinion has occurred almost entirely because, every single time I encounter something that "accepts Markdown", I have to spend some time investigating its documentation to find out what ill-specified sui generis variation of Markdown it supports, and then, usually, also poke at the implementation in order to find out where it differs from the docs. Every single time.
This would not happen if Markdown were well enough specified that developers could just drop in a parser library and be done.
Gruber's currency? Everyone knows he invented Markdown. Everyone loves him for it. And everyone who has ever dealt with Markdown more than once knows that Gruber didn't take it far enough. He's had ten years in which to do so, and he hasn't done it. Now the community, led by Atwood et al., is acting to redress the lack.
That Gruber should be upset by their calling their standardized Markdown "Standard Markdown", when he's had and squandered a decade in which to address the plainly evident need for that very thing, leaves me utterly unmoved. If it bothers him badly enough, let him sue! And we'll all see how well that works out for him. Otherwise, his "currency" would I think gain more from almost any other course of action than further prolonging the exercise in sour grapes which his Twitter appears to have become.
If it's Gruber's currency, it's accumulated in spite of Gruber's best efforts to strangle that particular metaphorical revenue stream.
If "Markdown" was just one ergonomic markup syntax among many, then yes, a hostile name-takeover would be completely a dick move. However, Markdown won; there's a bazillion slightly-incompatible implementations, and it's not Gruber's baby anymore. Hundreds if not thousands of people have invested a part of their life into Markdown, either by writing an implementation, using one in a larger product, or just taking the time to learn the syntax.
While Gruber is the original creator of Markdown and deserves respect for that design achievement, the Markdown community is much, much larger than he is and when the two come into conflict, it's not surprising that Gruber loses.
"the currency behind it" seems to be everything about this. These identical actions, under a different name that neither included nor winkingly referred to Markdown, would neither bother Gruber NOR provoke any community reaction. It is an odd situation.
They also want to use the name because their project directly comes from Markdown. And is a fully fleshed-out spec for Markdown that does not currently exist. And because it makes their project easily recognizable for what it is: a standard for Gruber's Markdown.
They may very well end up changing the name, but that doesn't change the fact that this project is basically Markdown++.
Vanilla Markdown last versioned in December of 2004. He has moved on; it's just that, now that someone wants to pick up the baton he discarded so long ago, he's fussed about someone else getting the benefit of what has heretofore served him as a neat, low-effort little generator of social-marketing capital.
I might even have some sympathy for that perspective, if not for the fact that his disinterest in doing anything with Markdown has resulted in such a broad range of subtly incompatible forks, thus complicating many people's lives, mine included, for what strikes me as frankly no good reason at all.
Let him sue, if he likes, or let him keep unfavorably impressing people with public bitching and moaning -- or let him do the sensible thing, if he hasn't yet entirely foreclosed that possibility, and try to walk back his recent bitter outbursts in favor of a public opinion on the lines of "I sure wish I'd had the time to do this sort of thing before now! But I'm glad to see such a strong community carrying forward the idea I came up with so long ago." But to leave Markdown in the dust for a decade, then get all grabby again all of a sudden for what look more and more like the most transparently shallow of reasons, is just churlish.
He can believe that it doesn't need to be touched all he likes, it doesn't change the fact that it does. The many subtly incompatible forks dealing with Markdowns ambiguities attest to that.
Want to write some Markdown? Do you use vanilla markdown, github markdown, stackoverflow markdown, PHP markdown, a markdown parser with extensions? What we don't need is yet another fork but a standard. Gruber doesn't want to step up to the plate? Fine. The community will. Gruber doesn't like the name? Deal with it.
Is the solution as simple as changing the name to "Interoperable Markdown"?
Markdown interoperability is not now and has never been a goal of Gruber's -- indeed he seems to celebrate the lack of it. Use of the name "<adjective> Markdown" for incompatible derivatives has been accepted for many years. So replacing the word "Standard" with an explicit description of the difference ("Interoperable") between plain old Markdown (whatever that is, since it's not well-defined) and this must be OK, right?
Read the foreword to http://flash-gordon.me.uk/ansi.c.txt , and it sounds very similar to the Markdown issue. C is still called C, regardless of what ANSI (and later ISO) did to it.
I don't think that's an issue of control. Quite the contrary, Gruber wants nobody to have the control, and he doesn't want the language to be standardized, as he believes that it will prevent it from evolving and expanding on its own.
He didn't complain about MultiMarkdown or GitHub Flavored Markdown, because those examples of precisely that evolution. The problem with "Standard Markdown" is that it implies "the one true way", and gives a (theoretical at least) power to a relatively small group to dictate what is Markdown-kosher and what isn't.
In his previous article (http://spinhalf.net/typos/), he rails against typos and about how horrible they are for our comprehension. Not surprisingly, he messes up himself:
As I finished reading his piece on Markdown (with which I agreed wholeheartedly), my eyes glanced down through the next heading, "Typos", through the date, and landed on "efficeint".
When it comes to blog posts on Markdown standardization, I think that Gruber's stance that Markdown succeeded because of its lack of specification is assumed background information. I don't think that tweet is the first time Gruber has expressed the sentiment.
I agree, there was never any doubt that Gruber felt this way.
I just thought it was interesting that the OP's quote was in direct contradiction to a quote Gruber Tweeted yesterday, and thought the Tweet and its context was worth including here, considering it wasn't cited in the blog.
A similar situation happened to me, but obviously on a smaller scale.
I added support for using pixel shaders on emulated video game output, but rather than have separate files for the vertex and fragment shaders, I put the pair into an XML file, and also included settings for min/mag filter, texture format, etc there as well; so that it was all self-contained as a single file that you could paste on a forum.
I released this, and some other people liked the idea, but wanted it to support multiple shader passes. Which was great! I wanted to add this, but had a lot of much higher priority items on my plate and couldn't get to it quickly enough.
So they went ahead and added multi-pass, texture lookup, reflection, and a whole bunch of other neat features without consulting me, released their own software and then called it "version 1.1", while continuing to support my spec as "version 1.0"
The results were obvious: lots of users coming to me to ask why their XML shaders weren't working, which turned out to be because they were using a different standard. Shader writers began targeting 1.1 syntax even without using any additional features, which needlessly took away compatibility with my own program.
This wouldn't have been so bad, I could have just supported their new spec once I had time, except that they took the spec in a direction I felt was flawed and against the spirit of it. Referencing external texture files which created file naming conflicts (shader A and shader B both loading their own separate versions of texture.png), losing the ability to post them as inline text on forums, having very inconsistent syntax to what I had been doing, features that were vague in their combinatorial effects, etc.
I ultimately had to abandon my own (retroactively named for me) "version 1.0" specification and start on an entirely new format to resolve that ambiguity.
They were certainly in the right and clear to do the work that I wouldn't, but I do regret that they took my name, and ended up causing a lot of confusion for end users. And now I worry about this happening to all of my formats (I have a markup format, a delta-based binary diff tool, the new multi-pass shader format, and a few others.)
I could try and come up with some licensing term that would most certainly get all of my software kicked out of Debian's main repositories; but there's really no way for me to stop anyone from fragmenting my specifications again, as I simply don't have the money nor desire to trademark things and attempt to sue people for enforcement.
So, with that said ... I'm with John Gruber on this. If he is asking them to change the name, they should change the name. It's just the polite thing to do. Even if Gruber is a terrible steward, he created it. Keeping Markdown in the name is clearly just intended to capitalize on the success of the format, which they themselves did not earn.
Jeff Atwood and co have done nothing but praise Markdown. They've worked really hard to flesh out a starting point for a standardized Markdown implementation. I think the word they chose, "Standard" makes perfect sense here.
Instead, both John Gruber and Marco Arment are acting super immature about the whole situation. Reading their Tweets today I keep imagining them stomping their feet on the ground because someone did something they didn't approve of.
I don't mean to add fuel to any fire, but I really think we shouldn't be validating their overly-dramatic behavior. I'm sure that Gruber could have politely sent Atwood an email or even public tweet asking that his project reconsider a better name, maybe even calling it something like "Rockdown." From everything I've read so far, Atwood seemed to want Gruber on board but got crickets instead.