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A comment on Markdown: The Spec - it's coming and it's full of personalities. Parent comment

Re:Markdown: The Spec - it's coming and it's full of persona... by dodyg on Tuesday October 30, 2012 @08:17AM (#4717050)
Gruber invented Markdown, full stop. If people want to come up with a 'better Markdown", fine but call it something else.
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Re:Markdown: The Spec - it's coming and it's full of persona... by BCM43 on Tuesday October 30, 2012 @11:24AM (#4717714)
That's what they're doing, and calling it rockdown.
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Re:Markdown: The Spec - it's coming and it's full of persona... by ScottBurson on Tuesday October 30, 2012 @01:09PM (#4718305)
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.

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Re:Markdown: The Spec - it's coming and it's full of persona... by jspthrowaway on Tuesday October 30, 2012 @02:14PM (#4718633)
Markdown is a specific implementation, a concept lost on the majority of the people in this thread.
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Re:Markdown: The Spec - it's coming and it's full of persona... by dasil003 on Tuesday October 30, 2012 @09:02AM (#4717163)
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.
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Re:Markdown: The Spec - it's coming and it's full of persona... by loup-vaillant on Tuesday October 30, 2012 @12:53PM (#4718225)
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.

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