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Comment by ars | Hacker News Reader

John Gruber doesn't really look very good here.

I think the reason he's "infuriated" is that his "contributions" to the tech community are really quite meager- just this one thing that he appears to have spent an afternoon on. (Oh, and that "app" where his "contribution" according to him was "tastemaker", it was built and designed by two other people.)

Meanwhile he seems unreasonably widely respected, despite, like Marco, very obviously being quite the jerk.

He's succeeded in building a cult of personality, and his ego can't handle having the One Thing He Ever Created fixed.

For this reason- I think they should have come up with a wholly new name. Using the word "markdown" gives gruber too much credit. It's not like he invented JSON or anything.

I don't know any of these folks and don't have any dog in this fight but to belittle the creator of markdown by saying his contribution to the tech community as meager is silly. I am completely out of the hipster tech loop and found myself thinking just today "man I wish this editing software allowed for markdown".

I don't know what your contributions are to the tech community but I'd be well chuffed if any of my tech contributions had the wide reach of markdown.

The way people talk about Microsoft around here, you'd think that they never contributed anything to the tech community either.

>Oh, and that "app" where his "contribution" according to him was "tastemaker", it was built and designed by two other people

Not to mention the app is not anything to write home about at all.

He was at best a web designer back when the web didn't even know AJAX.

> invented JSON

Now consider what Doug Crockford labels himself as: discoverer of JSON.

DC is self-aware, humble, and thoughtful.

Contrast that with today's displayed behaviour: name-calling, puffery, 3 demands (apology, cease and no-redirect, new name).

Yeah, this feels petty (on Gruber's part).

So the whole issue comes down to the word "Standard" versus "Common." Not the word "Markdown." And not any of this (silly) "it's supposed to be ambiguous" argument.

Done and done, I suppose.

Oh, and it's the "don't redirect standardmarkdown.com" bit that really strikes me as juvenile, for some reason.

Gruber didn't agree to "Common" in any way.

True, but he offered two possible options, both of which used "Markdown." So it apparently wasn't the word "Markdown" that was the issue.

The whole issue comes down to laying a claim on Markdown.

Gruber certainly doesn't look like he did everything he could or really much of anything until after it was announced.

That said, to take something that is not your original work and to declare it "Standard" or even "Common" is a massive faux pas in my view. It is not yours, it is not your place to declare your variant to be either standard or common. Especially when practically nobody has heard of if.

Can you truely own an idea or concept? What makes it yours? Creating it?

Um, my employers certainly think so as they pay me a large amount of money based on that concept and invest in all manner of lawyers to back it up.

We can argue about what are adequate and reasonable IP laws but a large percentage of the tech industry is based on the legal ability to own ideas and concepts.

The "Standard Markdown" name really did feel like a grab for ownership. Legally I'd imagine it was fine, but it wasn't very nice.

Gruber was apparently unresponsive to them when they asked about it, and then was publicly cranky.

So neither side looks great. But I'd say Gruber feels more sympathetic to me.

I don't know. It seems like "Standard Markdown" was created out of love for Markdown (2 years of work..) and wanting to create a solid, standardized foundation for it for the future. No matter what they called it, I bet it would have been called out as an ownership grab because the core of what they're doing: formalizing Markdown, something not created by them and something that the creator clearly doesn't want formalized.

But it's pretty clear that there's a need for it at this point.. the amount of work and coordination that went into it almost proves the point. The fact that it's used everywhere certainly does.

It can be pretty hard to do the right thing in a lot of cases without ruffling some feathers. That's how I see this whole situation.

I quite agree that they're doing something useful. I think they have good motivations, and it makes a lot of sense for the big Markdown-using sites to standardize on a particular Markdown dialect.

I do disagree that there'd have been a kerfuffle over this if they'd picked a completely new name, though. I'm sure there'd have been some people who said "Markdown was just fine for me" and grumbled, but the widespread debate that Standard Markdown caused? Unlikely.

Given that the people involved have enough clout to cause widespread use of this format regardless of the name, picking a name they knew would be contentious based on their previous communication with Gruber seems like an unfortunate distraction from something new and useful.

Grabbing for "ownership" of an effectively abandoned project after two years of work doesn't seem unreasonable to me. They're trying to take up an old project and continue development from where it left off.

I absolutely think they're doing a good thing here. But the normal etiquette if you're taking over an abandoned open source project and can't get in touch with the original author is to change the name.

Plus, of course, in this case it's not actually abandoned. It's in the state Gruber apparently wants it to be in, and others disagree. That changes the situation noticeably.

Well, I'm sorry, but in my book if you make something Open Source, stay as the maintainer for a long time yet fix no bugs or make no improvements, don't register the trademark AND publicly complain when people try to improve the situation, you're like a parent who doesn't treat his child well. And in most societies I know of, that's a valid reason to lose your rights as a parent.

Harsh comparison, but I feel it reflect the current situation well.

That's a sillily emotionally-loaded comparison. An open source project is hardly a child, neglected or otherwise.

The proper course of action here is a fork, which has no equivalent in your analogy. Gruber's Markdown remains as he likes it, under the name it's already widely known as. The new Markdown-based language picks a suitably disambiguated name and becomes what its maintainers want it to be.

Not all forks pick "suitably disambiguated" names. In fact most hostile forks actually picked a name that was making fun of the original. Or just piggy backed the "brand". The only cases where this didn't happen was where trademarks were involved (OpenOffice.org, Hudson), and even those cases might imply pointing fingers (open has far more restrictive connotations in the software world than libre).

And in this case I do hope that the hostile fork actually becomes what it aims for: standard/common and basically makes everyone forget about Markdown.pl.

"Gruber was apparently unresponsive to them when they asked about it"

They didn't mention that they'd be calling it Standard Markdown when they emailed him about it - and he was on vacation when it happened...

I think it's great if they want to move the idea forward, but if he wants them to come up with their own name (which he very publicly said before this all happened) then that would have been the right thing to do...

Eh, I dunno. Dude creates something. It gets widely adopted. Other group of people want to improve on it by changing it.

Dude's stance is: That's fine, I guess... but use your own name.

Seems reasonable.

Is that how it went, though?

At least by the account of the Standard/CommonMarkdown team, it looks more like:

Dude creates something. It gets widely adopted (and distorted along the way). Other group of people want to improve it by standardizing it (not changing it).

Dude's stance is: ...

Standardizers: so, uh, do you want to take part?

Dude's stance is: ...

Standardizers: do you at least agree with the name?

Dude's stance is: ...

Standardizers: look, we've gone ahead and did this.

Dude's stance is: outrageous!

(Ironies get exchanged by both sides)

Standardizers: ok, we apologize for the name grab. Here is a list of alternative names we could use (list). Which one do you prefer?

Dude's stance is: ...

(while tweeting ironies about it, presumably instead of replying to their email)

Standardizers: ok, we've gone ahead and picked one alternative.

Dude's stance will be (I'm guessing): blasphemy!

This is unbelievably accurate. Not even joking. And the last response I got was indeed, more or less, blasphemy!

I'm pretty sure the "Dude's stance" is pretty explicit, and public. tl/dr: do want you want, don't use the word markdown.

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

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