Comment by semisight | Hacker News Reader

Comment by semisight | Hacker News Reader

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I agree with the majority here--Atwood's reaction complies with the word of the request, but not the spirit of it. On Twitter, Gruber says that he's opposed to the naming because it restricts markdown [1]. Aka, valid markdown from Gruber's markdown processor may not always compile on Common Markdown.

Honestly, this seems pretty reasonable to me. I also don't think that the Common Markdown implementors gave Gruber a sufficient amount of time to respond: "We haven't heard back after replying last night, and I'm not sure we ever will..." (emphasis mine). Last night? This is one of Gruber's most famous projects, and you're giving him hours to respond?

Honestly, I think they're going about this the wrong way. This group has people at both Stack Overflow, Reddit, and Github, three of the most prominent users of Markdown. Why not rename their version completely? It would eliminate the possibility of future conflict (which IMO is almost guaranteed). They don't need the name recognition--Markdown has needed this for a while, and I think it will be adopted fairly quickly.

As for "new" names, how about:

* ReMD (pronounced "remedy"): fairly standard programming naming convention--adding "Re" as a prefix. Also easy to Google.

* Vernacular: Longer, less common word.

Good luck to Atwood and Co.. I really do hope they find a way to keep the project going.

[1] https://twitter.com/gruber/status/507651498692849665

  Last night? This is one of Gruber's most famous 
  projects, and you're giving him hours to respond?

They've tried to get him on board and be an active stewart of his own project for literally years - since 2009 or so, at least.

The entire time, he's alternated between being uncommunicative and outright dismissive of any attempts to clarify his original Markdown syntax.

The fact that they're involving him at all is a courtesy, a well-intentioned mistake. A mistake I definitely would have made too. (Not that I have the 1/1,000 of Jeff Atwood's coding chops or industry influence!) In hindsight, they should have forked and never looked back at Gruber.

"The fact that they're involving him at all is a courtesy, a well-intentioned mistake. A mistake I definitely would have made too."

These are necessary mistakes. Better to have tried to get John Gruber on board and failed, than to not have tried.

That way they can always point at the conversation to show that they did try, but Gruber was not interested in collaborating. Otherwise, John Gruber always have the "they stole Markdown from me. They didn't even ask me. I was willing to collaborate." excuse.

It's an open source thing, try to work within the community before forking. Forking is a last resort. This might get to the point where forking is now a reasonable course of action.

It was certainly their decision to do a clean fork or not, and I'm not judging them for wanting to take ownership of a neglected project. I was just commenting on the fact that Atwood had sent an email and expected a response in 24 hours or so. A week or two would perhaps have been sufficient.

> Aka, valid markdown from Gruber's markdown processor may not always compile on Common Markdown.

Such change is inevitable, since markdown.pl is downright buggy. This hurts the validity of Gruber's claim a lot in my opinion.

Change is sorely needed, I agree. And I don't think that the Common Markdown team should be forced to be backwards-compatible (I would prefer they didn't). However, Gruber's request to simply not call it Markdown is fairly reasonable, the same way you wouldn't call Clojure "Common Lisp."

One little problem: Gruber didn't call his thing "Common Lisp" or something. He called it "Lisp". Which is only natural, since he was the first. My point is, he claimed the shortest name. There are few ways around that.

And since this new standard differs so little, compared to the other flavours who do call themselves "FooBar Markdown" without much reaction from Gruber, I think it's only reasonable they call themselves "Markdown" as well.

I don't recall, John McCarthy complaining about Common Lisp taking a name claiming they were now the new and official Lisp. And this Lisp differs quite considerably from his original, with lexical scope and all. Even Scheme and Clojure, who don't bear the name, say all over that they're a Lisp.

So, I can't be sympathetic to Gruber's reaction. He abandoned ship. He forfeited the right to steer it.

Steele/Gabriel about the name Common Lisp:

> After a day and a half of technical discussion, this group went off to the Oakland Original, a greasy submarine sandwich place not far from CMU. During and after lunch the topic of the name for the Lisp came up, and such obvious names as NIL and SPICE Lisp were proposed and rejected—as giving too much credit to one group and not enough to others—and such non-obvious names as Yu-Hsiang Lisp were also proposed and reluctantly rejected.

> The name felt to be best was “Standard Lisp,” but another dialect was known by that name already. In searching for similar words, the name “Common Lisp” came up. Gabriel remarked that this wasn’t a good name because we were trying to define an Elitist Lisp, and “Common Lisp” sounded too much like “Common Man Lisp.”

> The naming discussion resumed at dinner at the Pleasure Bar, an Italian restaurant in another Pittsburgh district, but no luck was had by all.

> Later in E-mail, Moon referred to “whatever we call this common Lisp,” and this time, amongst great sadness and consternation that a better name could not be had, it was selected.

When morality is down, the law is up. So, no thanks to the author?

cant upvote u enough!

Good commentary, but renaming it entirely seems a bit strong to me. It is, or intends to be, a better spec'ced version of Markdown.

I think those are two different issues. Gruber has a legal and moral right to ask the Common Markdown maintainers to change names. The easiest thing is just to not have a name with Markdown in it.

I don't disagree that it is still mostly Markdown. I do understand the Gruber complaint about it not being a strict superset. I see it as similar to C/C++. Not all C code is valid C++ code--they have diverged. No one would deny that they have a very closely shared heritage.

Gruber has a legal [...] right to ask the Common Markdown maintainers to change names.

On what grounds? I do not believe the legal situation is that clear-cut.

As far as the code goes, copyright is not involved as they don't use his code. The trademark hasn't been enforced and there are no trade secrets or patents involved.

The only legal issue I see involves the format itself. I'm not sure what US laws say about that, but I'd be surprised if there was an issue.

> Gruber has a legal and moral right to ask the Common Markdown maintainers to change names.

Gruber has a registered trademark or has he used the "TM" designator to denote a non-registered but protected trademark? My understanding is that if he has done neither, he doesn't have a legal claim to the name.

Hmmm. Easy (in the short-term) is not the driving criteria here, is it?

C++ added features to C. Common Markdown's main purpose is not to add features to Markdown; rather, its purpose is to standardize it:

> We propose a standard, unambiguous syntax specification for Markdown, along with a suite of comprehensive tests to validate Markdown implementations against this specification. We believe this is necessary, even essential, for the future of Markdown.

I think the Common Markdown community may (and should) add a grammar at some point, based on some discussion two days ago.

Though he did manage to find the time to berate and poke fun at the project on twitter all day.

140 characters may not contain the full breadth of his view on the topic. Tweets are easy to compose but myopic. All the same, I understand your point. There's definitely stuff we don't know here.

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