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Comment by jeremiep | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, but I wish they'd give more credit where due.

On their markdown page they claim "For GitLab we developed something we call "GitLab Flavored Markdown" (GFM)." while that is obviously a ripoff of GitHub Flavoured Markdown.

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I agree we should give attribution here and created https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/merge_requests/3546 to do so. Edit: this was merged.

This is why I like GitLab! Thanks for doing this :)

You're not only productive at shipping quality features but also listening to people using your product! This makes me even happier to be using it at work :)

Thank you for your kind words. Two funny things:

1. We're now at Git Merge http://git-merge.com/ and I'm looking forward to presenting at 4pm Eastern.

2. I said it was merged but Douwe used our Merge when build succeeds. A HN reader commented about a mistake and I was able to fix it in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/commit/79d6513f360d7... Thanks Greg!

@dang I'm sorry for this. Please understand I was inebriated when I posted this comment, but I will always appreciate your work and if you ban me for the following comment, I understand.

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syste - I love you man. You are an amazing CEO. Your company does great work and has a great product. I always become so happy when I see you actively responding to the comments here. You are a role model CEO.

Something so many companies overlook is actually listening to their users and taking their feedback seriously. I love you man, if you wrote an autobiography I would buy it. Congratulations to you and your team.

Thanks! Glad to know if I write something about myself it will have a minimum of two buyers (my mom is very supportive too).

I like to write about business stuff most. Any merge requests on our handbook https://about.gitlab.com/handbook and strategy https://about.gitlab.com/strategy are appreciated.

styse, you are a great motivation for the product company I run. I checked your strategy page and you are planning to integrate with NetSuite. Why not something open source for finance? ERPNext?

disclaimer: I am the founder of erpnext

Thanks for your kind words. ERPNext looks cool. We try to use open source where we can although we also try to use boring solutions. In this case we already completed the NetSuite implementation so we're not in the market at the moment. BTW I'm not sure ERPNext is ideal for our use case, we would need multi-company consolidation.

The lines with soft line breaks (double spaces at the end) appear to have had their trailing whitespace trimmed, which ends up looking like:

    Roses are red Violets are blue
    
    Sugar is sweet

rather than:

    Roses are red
    Violets are blue
    
    Sugar is sweet

Sorry, I'm committing from The Git Merge conference and didn't have the time. It should render OK. Feel free to submit a merge request to fix it.

You know what's even better to me than GitHub-Flavoured Markdown? Markdeep:

https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/

Demo:

https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/features.md.html

Yes, I know they likely provided it for compatibility, but markdeep is just too cool to not mention.

GitHub Flavored Markdown is itself a rip of the markdown standard. Is it giving enough credit to markdown for GitHub to include the word "markdown" in the name? If so, then by extension it should be sufficient for GitLab to include "flavored markdown" in the name. ;)

Thats a good point! I did not see it that way.

The many "standards" of Markdown also now include CommonMark [1]. There is also some interesting history as to why it is not named "Standard Markdown".

[1] http://commonmark.org/ [2] https://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-commo...

Man, as much as I admire and respect his intelligence, sometimes Gruber can be quite unreasonable.

Yeah, after reading that I came away with a really REALLY sour taste in my mouth. What got stuck in his craw and died?

It's also especially annoying when you consider that Gruber seems opposed to the idea of anyone else fleshing out Markdown properly, but he's not doing anything himself. At some point what he did with Markdown was basically just squatting on it himself, making any improving of it at the source impossible.

I think phrasing it as "also now include CommonMark" is a little misleading, it has been around for a few years now and the entire goal is to take the quotes off of the "standards" to actually have a Markdown specification. The drivers behind it also include (IIRC) GitHub and StackExchange.

That said, I did not notice the "GitLab Flavored Markdown" in the story link but I'll be fairly disappointed if it is actually "yet another Markdown pseudo-standard" and not CommonMark.

I do hate the fact that they use yet-another-markdown-flavour.

I wish they'd move over to CommonMark, which actually attempts to standardize Markdown once and for all.

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