Correct. Not to get too in the weeds on a 10 year old controversy, but Gruber has gone on the record to say he is cool with things like GitHub-flavored Markdown but from what I gathered back then and since then whenever he spoke on the subject (which has not been a lot), his issue with the CommonMark project (as it would eventually be called) using any name that included “Markdown” in the name wasn’t cool with him since they went ahead with an ask forgiveness instead of receiving permission approach on attempting to basically expropriate Markdown. GitHub-flavored Markdown and things like it don’t do that, they just claim to be a different kind of Markdown.

Also never understood why he didn’t just go ahead and trademark it, but at this point would it even be enforceable? It’s kind of generic now, but I don’t know if it’s generic enough to not be enforceable either, and maybe he doesn’t want the obligation of having to enforce it.

EDIT: anyway, point is, this is so far from being Markdown or claiming to be that I don’t think there is a single issue with Markwhen as presented that would ruffle any feathers in Philly. The creator shouldn’t have to worry and nobody should be telling him to worry. Like, seriously, none of this is relevant. Markwhen is just a cool looking thing that exists now and I like timelines.

Having been kicked off the word standard, they immediately thought "how can we still do this while technically obeying it". So they picked the closest possible word to Standard, implying it really was the definitive version.

Yeah, I'd be grumpy too.

If he'd called it 'Atwood Flavoured Markdown' there wouldn't be an issue. But Joel wanted to own the definition of Markdown.

As a group of tech CEOs they decided to co-opt someone's idea without even asking if it was okay.

In fact kicking John off the project was the point.

You can do that, you just can't keep the name they created.