Comment by jspthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jspthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Regardless of how much I dislike Gruber's opinions on occasion, Jeff Atwood is completely steamrolling him here and I really feel for him; it isn't an accident that Jeff blogged about it instead of asking him privately. You do that when you don't care either way what the person says, and it's a completely dick move. As another commenter pointed out, there is no winning move for John Gruber here. That's so obvious that I can't even give Jeff the benefit of the doubt that he overlooked it.

This entire experience has left me with a bad taste in my mouth about Jeff Atwood -- I sure hope he doesn't set his sights on something useful that I've created for the world. You can make whatever argument you like about Gruber not "paying enough attention" to his creation, but Markdown doesn't really need to be "fixed" or "standardized". I look forward to the, undoubtedly, dozens of vendor-specific extensions that will be necessary in the final product and we'll end up right back at square one.

Really, really presumptuous and poor judgment. Invent your own stuff and let it stand on its merits rather than trading on Markdown's well-established name by force.

Jeff Atwood is a blowhard sure, but you're ignoring the history here. Gruber has refused for years to acknowledge that there are any problems with Markdown at all. Some argue that he has the right to do with his creation as he wishes, but that misses the larger point that Markdown has communal value far outstripping Gruber's original contribution of aggregating a bunch of ascii typographical conventions and compiling them in the spirit of Textile.

By sitting on his high horse and proclaiming Markdown "works for him" and that his unspecified version with tons of nasty edge cases is canonical and that not only is it correct, he won't weigh in on any formal specification, he deserves to be case aside and have the project taken forward without him. He doesn't have a moral claim on something as simple and widespread as Markdown, and the fact that he finally has to deal with someone with similar blog reach going on a crusade is nothing worse than he deserves for sticking his head in the sand.

Your comment reeks so strongly of entitlement that I don't even know where to begin.

We could say Twitter was instrumental in organizing human rights causes in the Middle East and is now important to the human race as a communication tool; that said, if Twitter doesn't implement a feature that you want, you don't get to redesign Twitter at your whim and call it "New Twitter". You don't have a "moral claim" to write an open letter to @jack telling him why you're moving on without him.

You instead, like all rational people, design a competing service and let your work stand on its own.

Entitlement to what? Common ideas?

The fact that you would bring up a hosted service that is extremely complex and costs tons of money shows that you don't understand where I'm coming from at all.

Markdown is not some amazing patented invention that John Gruber is entitled to perpetual dictatorial rights to forever. It's a simple derivative idea. It's out there in the wild and people make tremendous use of it, but none of this use costs John anything, and it's successful on the backs of many implementors, not just Gruber. It's all fine and good to say design a competing "service", but people do do that, and all it does is lead to yet another variant which further exacerbates the problem.

To be clear, I'm not saying John owes anyone anything. He's free to do or not do whatever he wants, but so are other people. Precisely what courtesy do you think he's due if he refuses to act in any reasonable capacity as a steward?

> Markdown is not some amazing patented invention that John Gruber is entitled to perpetual dictatorial rights to forever.

Completely wrong. Markdown is John Gruber's creation, and he is quite entitled to perpetual dictatorial rights forever (although copyright is limited, his estate is perfectly capable of renewing if he wishes). John Gruber is the copyright holder on Markdown (the idea and implementation, which most of this thread is overlooking). It says so right here:

http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/license

In the same license, it says:

> 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.

Think about that while I repeat: You do not get to take over someone's creation and trade on its name simply because you are not satisfied with the stewardship of its creator.

Gruber invented Markdown, full stop. If people want to come up with a 'better Markdown", fine but call it something else.

That's what they're doing, and calling it rockdown.

Gruber invented Markdown, full stop.

He may have selected the particular syntactic conventions it uses, but the idea of parsing ASCII markup and converting it to a formatter's input syntax is much older. I'm aware of prior art dating back to 1986 or so -- and wouldn't be surprised if that wasn't the first either.

Markdown is a specific implementation, a concept lost on the majority of the people in this thread.

Right, so, for the sake of argument, you support perpetual copyright and software patents? Just trying to gauge how much exclusive ownership you think people should have over ideas.

The issue here is trademark.

Some people want to make a Markdown spin-off: clean, standardized, tested etc. Nothing ever stopped them, but they could really use the prestige given by the original name.

The question is, does John Gruber have the right to that name? I think he should give it away, but if he won't, we probably shouldn't force him. I'd change my mind if someone makes a compelling case against trademarks.

>> moving on without him.

John Gruber wasn't moving at all

A better analogy: If Twitter had an API, and then had a spec for that API, and they didn't match, would it be out of line to call on Twitter to fix the API spec? And to put out a third-party spec if they didn't?

> it isn't an accident that Jeff blogged about it instead of asking him privately. You do that when you don't care either way what the person says, and it's a completely dick move. As another commenter pointed out, there is no winning move for John Gruber here. That's so obvious that I can't even give Jeff the benefit of the doubt that he overlooked it.

What if he did ask Gruber privately, and the private answer then was the same as the public one now, giving Atwood the choice between disclosing a private conversation, giving up on this, or doing what he has done.

I'd say you've discovered a hefty dose of speculation that lacks any evidence.

You've also invented a false trichotomy. Those aren't Jeff's only three choices. The fourth one you left out is "make something new without shitting all over Markdown".

> You've also invented a false trichotomy. Those aren't Jeff's only three choices. The fourth one you left out is "make something new without shitting all over Markdown".

And then everyone would criticize him for NIH syndrome and needlessly fragmenting the markup landscape further. And they would be right.

What I'm saying is that we should not assume that there was no private conversation just because Atwood doesn't mention it.

That's precisely what we should assume, because it's the facts as presented. Inferring things that don't exist because they benefit the parties in question is a subtle undercurrent that drives the entirety of our fact-unfriendly blogosphere, tabloids, and so on. You sound a little like an apologetic Gawker reporter, here.

We were given the story at face value, we interpret it at face value. We don't make up what could have been nor consider it acceptable to do so.

You're making something up as well if you assume Atwood intentionally did not contact Gruber beforehand. That is most definitely NOT interpreting the story at face value.

The dilemma is that it's basically impossible to contact one of these big blog/twitter folks privately. Send email? DM? I'm sure they get way too much volume (and hatemail) to even read it.

Then you contact a close friend (i.e. "His people"). I'm sure someone as smart and well connected as Jeff Atwood could figure it out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com