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Markdown (and what do you do when a community outgrows your contribution)

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wraith808:
Wow! I'm a big Markdown fan myself. Didn't know about this dispute though. Would be interesting to know what goes on inside Gruber's head. Seems like he missed the chance to be part of something important. I'm actually surprised how much effort the team behind CommonMark put into getting him on board. With the attitude he demonstrates, I think I would have just ignore him much sooner.
-phitsc (September 07, 2014, 01:56 PM)
--- End quote ---

Well, he's aptly stated what goes on inside of his head.  I can't find the interview quote right now*, but he's outright said that markdown doesn't need a standard, when it's obvious that it does... especially to the end user.  I was using three different markdown tools... one to edit online so I could do it anywhere and sync via dropbox... one locally to take that sync and format it (a piece of software I'm working on and hoping to have for NANY) and one to take the formatted version and output a word document for distribution.  The amount of effort I had to do to make sure that the final product was good for distribution was painful.

Of course, it doesn't help that he is sort of acting passive aggressive about the whole thing.  He's not personally insulting CommonMark or Jeff Atwood... he's letting his followers doing it an retweeting them.



Staying classy and above the fray there...

* It was a tweet, as most things in this seem to be: https://twitter.com/gruber/status/507364924340060160

wraith808:
And it gets worse...

https://twitter.com/gruber/status/507647288471470080

and it appears that Jeff Atwood has learned a lesson... even to douchey responses (though admittedly, he could have left the finally off his original tweet or used another word), he's responding better now...

https://twitter.com/codinghorror/status/507847788592246785

Some historical context also:

https://twitter.com/gruber/status/262287246953164800

https://twitter.com/gruber/status/261650083689426945

Renegade:
Fight! Fight!  :Thmbsup:

I want to see blood a crash a null pointer exception!

phitsc:
The same thing just starts happening with Scala. Even has some reference to the Markdown quarrel in the comments ;D

mouser:
So I finally had a chance to read through the comments in the second codinghorror/stackoverflow post (here), and I guess I can see part of the argument being made on behalf of Gruber, which I interpret something like this: "There is a person who clearly invented this thing called Markdown, and you can't just publish something that you name in a way that makes it sound like the official standard version of it, against the will of the creator, even if that person is being an asshole.  You should have tried harder and earlier to contact the original inventor, and you certainly shouldn't have tried to be cheeky on day 2 by changing the name from 'standard markdown' to 'common markdown' and act like that was the end of the issue."

As someone who thinks the original creator is entitled to some real deference, and as someone who has always been uncomfortable about the possibility of forks of opensource projects being used to take control away from the creator of a project, even if they are unreasonable bastards, I have some natural sympathy for the position of the original author..

Anyway, I think the lessons are pretty clear for the rest of us:

* Work harder to get the original author to be part of your project.
* At the very least, determine if the original author is going to be a jerk about improving their creation, or is against your idea.
* If the original author is going to make it impossible for you to use the name of their project, for whatever reason, find another starting point and let go of the idea of using that product as a starting point.

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