Gruber has been okay with people writing and distributing their own markdown processors, with whatever variations they want.
The difference here is that they wrote a spec for the variation they plan to implement? That somehow makes it not cool?
Or just that they're calling it "Standard Markdown"? Could the dispute be avoided if they called it "A Standardized Markdown", or "Standardized Flavor of Markdown" instead?
There are many markdowns, and Gruber likes that, fine. Other people would like to standardize and make compatible implementations. Nothing's stopping people who disagree from continuing to ignore the standardized spec. But where' the logic in saying "you can release whatever markdown variations you like, as long as you don't try to make different implementations compatible with each other."
It really should be obvious that none of those other names are acceptable. Github-flavored markup is obvious because it is _not_ taking the name from the author and it is not lying about where it comes from.
Standard markdown lies about where it comes from and thus claims more authority than it is due. Formalize it all you want, then name it coding horror markup.
I don't see how stealing other peoples credit is acceptable.
The difference here is that they wrote a spec for the variation they plan to implement? That somehow makes it not cool?
Or just that they're calling it "Standard Markdown"? Could the dispute be avoided if they called it "A Standardized Markdown", or "Standardized Flavor of Markdown" instead?
There are many markdowns, and Gruber likes that, fine. Other people would like to standardize and make compatible implementations. Nothing's stopping people who disagree from continuing to ignore the standardized spec. But where' the logic in saying "you can release whatever markdown variations you like, as long as you don't try to make different implementations compatible with each other."