[Chickencha]

This is the nature of free software and a big part of why free software is great. Sometimes a maintainer can no longer work on a project for a variety of reasons. A free license makes it pretty easy for someone to fork the project and take over development.

It would be nice if John Gruber opened up the contribution process or officially handed off development to someone else, but he's under no obligation to do so. We're not paying him. He probably started Markdown for his own purposes and was kind enough to release it under a free license. It's totally fine if he doesn't want to continue work on it, because I can easily take his code, check it into GitHub, and start my own fork.