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Comment by arrrg | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

> 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."

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