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

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.