I bet, if I would take your copyrighted work, create a deritative work, have the gall to call it "Standard YourCopyrightedWork", and then go back and forth if it is a derivative work or not, you would certainly not consider me friendly either.
As someone who contributed a bit to the early CommonMark spec I think some of us were really doing it the shitty way towards Gruber.
How would the Rust people react if we created a "Standard Rust" language?
>Markdown is free software, available under a BSD-style open source license.
John Gruber's markdown is unmaintained (last updated in 2004), free software, which many people have contributed to to fix oversights and extend its capabilities. This is exactly how fsf is supposed to work.
You are unfortunately making the same incorrect conclusion many of us did back then.
It was about the _Name_ , never about the syntax/implementation.
Gruber was very clear with his license and regular words that he did not allow the usage of the name in a manner which would cause people to be confused or suggest that it was an official implementation.
Huh. Good point, I did miss that. That, however, seems to primarily be an issue of trademark, not copyright. And once we enter the domain of trademark [law], genericization becomes a salient point, especially with the "anyone can use it however they want" reality of FSF.
The usage of the word "copyright" made me wonder... can you even copyright Markdown? I don't think you can, can you? You can copyright the spec (if any) or the reference implementation, but you cannot copyright the concept or syntax itself.
You could maybe patent Markdown (given the amount of trash software patents I've seen I wouldn't be surprised) but (1) it's not patented AFAIK and (2) it's become so common (mark, heh) that I don't think it could be patented anymore.
You could say Markdown is covered as a trademark even if not officially registered maybe? I don't know the specifics though, could anyone chime in? (this is complicated further by the different jurisdictions). But my understanding of the general idea is that if your trademark becomes common (which I guess happened?) or you don't actively defend it (which is what Gruber was trying to do fighting Standard Markdown), you lose it.
So, to summarize, I think he was right to be angry (in a moral way) but that's possibly the only right he had in the literal sense. Which is more than enough of course.
How I see it as well. Gruber really wanted the project to use a name which did not imply any kind of “official” status, support, or such relationship with regards to him and Markdown.
What if someone went to the effort of congregating around making a standard out of my weekend (? I dunno) Perl script? I would be elated. But maybe my standards are low because I’m not already “famous”.
If the crucial part here is the fact that he apparently already copyrighted the name then that seems kind of like begging the question. I wouldn’t copyright a bland name like that which has no connection to my own person. (Maybe I would copyright something like keybord-lang though...)
As someone who contributed a bit to the early CommonMark spec I think some of us were really doing it the shitty way towards Gruber.
How would the Rust people react if we created a "Standard Rust" language?