[philoushka]

Either way, they're forcing his hand. He's been sitting back while others have been simply trying to get a spec.

If he wants to be grumpy, cool. GH, SO, and Reddit will forge on. If we wants to litigate, cool too; bring it on.

Those 3 communities have large overlapping userbases. This baby is being born, Gruber or not, and nobody will remember in n years about the current kerfuffle.

[tripzilch]

> Either way, they're forcing his hand.

Which I think is good. Long overdue, maybe even.

It's good something like Markdown exists, and it shouldn't have had to flourish despite not having an unambiguous formalized spec.

> If we wants to litigate, cool too; bring it on.

He's got nothing to litigate about. The trademark claim on "Markdown" had no place in his copyright license, nor does that copyright license affect this specifications project in any meaningful way (because they don't use the copyrighted work).

That's why the only valid argument so far has been over the implications of the word "Standard" in "Standard Markdown" being a "dick move" (which is a personal POV, which is fine, which I also happen to disagree with).

[tomjen3]

>If we wants to litigate, cool too; bring it on

That would be a quick way to shut it down. Just threaten to sue anybody who _implements_ it.

[ojessen]

And how would that work? Let's assume I wrote BrainFuckStandardMD, the implementation for Brainfuck. I would base it solely on the spec published as Common Markdown. I would not in any way use the copyrighted code as basis for my implementation, so it is not derived from it. I don't use the name markdown, so that even the ficticious claim to a trademark would be void. On what grounds would he sue me?