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The intelligent way around it is to recognise that John Gruber's rights and license, and chose a path that both respects the limitations he puts in place and al

The intelligent way around it is to recognise that John Gruber's rights and license, and chose a path that both respects the limitations he puts in place and allows a community to coalesce around a standardised form of a text format derived from John Gruber's spec. So the intelligent action is to not call it Markdown, since that requires Gruber's written permission, which is currently a time-sensitive issue, and may be a show stopper later as his format slips more and more out of his control. Pick a new name, document that it's derived from Markdown (and respects John Gruber's wishes), and create a community around the better specified and test-case based approach to standardisation. Product prefer using derivative libraries, rather than Gruber's own Markdown implementation. (With or without Gruber's written permission). Pandoc, for example, is a common library for Markdown support, I guess GitHub, Reddit, stack overflow are using their own custom implementations, or implementations that started or during their lifetime became custom implementations.

_broody 12y ago
Does Gruber's license hold any weight here? They're not using his perl code. They aren't bound by any license on it. There was never even a markdown spec to license, just a blog post (and Gruber knows he can't claim any binding license over this spec, because he's not complaining about that, but just the name). Gruber had an implicit trademark on the name Markdown, but holding a trademark requires that a) you actively exploit it and b) protect it. As for a), he completely abandoned Markdown in 2007, never going anywhere with it after a few years of bad stewardship. And regarding b), since he allowed other implementations of the spec to pop up and use the name 'Markdown' liberally before this one, it has become a common item and no one really has any claim over it. For all the chest beating, Gruber has no business telling anyone what they can do with Markdown anymore, unless they're directly using Markdown.pl or taking code from it. Which no one is going to do ever again, specially not after this project sails away.

_broody 12y ago

Does Gruber's license hold any weight here? They're not using his perl code. They aren't bound by any license on it. There was never even a markdown spec to license, just a blog post (and Gruber knows he can't claim any binding license over this spec, because he's not complaining about that, but just the name). Gruber had an implicit trademark on the name Markdown, but holding a trademark requires that a) you actively exploit it and b) protect it. As for a), he completely abandoned Markdown in 2007, never going anywhere with it after a few years of bad stewardship. And regarding b), since he allowed other implementations of the spec to pop up and use the name 'Markdown' liberally before this one, it has become a common item and no one really has any claim over it. For all the chest beating, Gruber has no business telling anyone what they can do with Markdown anymore, unless they're directly using Markdown.pl or taking code from it. Which no one is going to do ever again, specially not after this project sails away.