[dasil003]

Entitlement to what? Common ideas?

The fact that you would bring up a hosted service that is extremely complex and costs tons of money shows that you don't understand where I'm coming from at all.

Markdown is not some amazing patented invention that John Gruber is entitled to perpetual dictatorial rights to forever. It's a simple derivative idea. It's out there in the wild and people make tremendous use of it, but none of this use costs John anything, and it's successful on the backs of many implementors, not just Gruber. It's all fine and good to say design a competing "service", but people do do that, and all it does is lead to yet another variant which further exacerbates the problem.

To be clear, I'm not saying John owes anyone anything. He's free to do or not do whatever he wants, but so are other people. Precisely what courtesy do you think he's due if he refuses to act in any reasonable capacity as a steward?

[jspthrowaway]

> Markdown is not some amazing patented invention that John Gruber is entitled to perpetual dictatorial rights to forever.

Completely wrong. Markdown is John Gruber's creation, and he is quite entitled to perpetual dictatorial rights forever (although copyright is limited, his estate is perfectly capable of renewing if he wishes). John Gruber is the copyright holder on Markdown (the idea and implementation, which most of this thread is overlooking). It says so right here:

http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/license

In the same license, it says:

> Neither the name “Markdown” nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

Think about that while I repeat: You do not get to take over someone's creation and trade on its name simply because you are not satisfied with the stewardship of its creator.

[dodyg]

Gruber invented Markdown, full stop. If people want to come up with a 'better Markdown", fine but call it something else.

[BCM43]

That's what they're doing, and calling it rockdown.

[ScottBurson]

Gruber invented Markdown, full stop.

He may have selected the particular syntactic conventions it uses, but the idea of parsing ASCII markup and converting it to a formatter's input syntax is much older. I'm aware of prior art dating back to 1986 or so -- and wouldn't be surprised if that wasn't the first either.

[jspthrowaway]

Markdown is a specific implementation, a concept lost on the majority of the people in this thread.

[dasil003]

Right, so, for the sake of argument, you support perpetual copyright and software patents? Just trying to gauge how much exclusive ownership you think people should have over ideas.

[loup-vaillant]

The issue here is trademark.

Some people want to make a Markdown spin-off: clean, standardized, tested etc. Nothing ever stopped them, but they could really use the prestige given by the original name.

The question is, does John Gruber have the right to that name? I think he should give it away, but if he won't, we probably shouldn't force him. I'd change my mind if someone makes a compelling case against trademarks.