[jspthrowaway]

Actually, he lost credibility for not being a decent human being and e-mailing John Gruber first and StackOverflow is really irrelevant here.

"Say, so-and-so, you wrote a really nice book but there are several errors in the first edition. We think it's great and we love it, and we see the potential in your work, so we're going to rewrite a second edition by committee then sell it under your title and byline without your permission; that cool with you?"

[InclinedPlane]

If Markdown had continued to be robustly maintained by Gruber then I would give that thought more credence. As it is now it's barely just one notch shy of abandonware, I think that transfers Gruber's feelings from the realm of reasonable criticism to the land of butthurt.

[andybak]

Yep. Nuances of etiquette are one thing but I'll always side with the person that is trying to move things forward over the person that is throwing up hurdles.

To my way of thinking, Gruber comes out of this looking churlish and unhelpful at best.

The more pertinent question is why Jeff didn't make more effort to base this off one of the existing standardisation efforts.

[Magenta]

This seems like a strawman. You can't fairly compare a language to a book. A book isn't used universally to make other completely unrelated books.