He owns an ambiguous text formatting system? He didn't invent the notion of simple ASCII-character based formatting, and he didn't write a spec. Plus this spec

He owns an ambiguous text formatting system? He didn't invent the notion of simple ASCII-character based formatting, and he didn't write a spec. Plus this spec explicitly deviates from his implementation, so it's not the same obviously. The reasons that he didn't write a spec after requests is very likely post-hoc rationalisation, behind the simple reason that writing a spec is not a fun task.