Please, let's tone down the rhetoric

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I’m concerned that the CommonMark specifications’s introduction, and some ongoing discussion on this site fall outside the community guidelines and perhaps generally accepted standards for civilized public discussion.

The entire introduction to the specification seems to carry over from a time when some thought it was appropriate to call this “Standard Markdown”, and still has a tone of pointing a finger of blame at John Gruber for failing to produce a specification or standard.

Guber wrote a tool (with documentation) called Markdown. He generously permitted copying of these under a license making it clear that it was provided “as is”, and with explicit recognition of the fact its the implementation (not the language it parses) that’s called Markdown.

Yet, the CommonMark specification continues to ignore that, starting out with a definition at odds with the license agreement’s terms:

“Markdown is a plain text format for writing structured documents,”

The CommonMark specification carries on for paragraphs, apparently criticizing the Markdown documentation for not being an unambiguous specification. Gruber never claimed the documentation to be unambigious, it’s more of a users guide. The tool however is unambigious, even though it’s written in a language that’s hard to read.

Furthermore, more recent writings have continued this tone of blaming Gruber rather than acknowleding his contribution, e.g:

"And yes, Gruber has caused fragmentation "… “If he had exhibited leadership” … “then there would have been no need for this effort.”

From my point-of-view, both of these are low-blows, and tarnish the reputation of CommonMark.org. This should be corrected as soon as possible.

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Guber wrote a tool (with documentation) called Markdown. He generously permitted copying of these under a license making it clear that it was provided “as is”, and with explicit recognition of the fact its the implementation (not the language it parses) that’s called Markdown.

On the contrary, he makes it very clear that the language is called
Markdown. Quoting from http://daringfireball/projects/markdown/: “Thus, “Markdown” is two things: (1) a plain text formatting syntax; and (2) a software tool, written in Perl, that converts the plain text formatting to HTML.”

(And, though I don’t want to revisit this discussion, for the record, I don’t think there was ever any violation of his license, because neither our spec nor our implementations were derivative, in the relevant legal sense, from his work. But out of respect for his wishes I was happy to support the renaming.)

The CommonMark specification carries on for paragraphs, apparently criticizing the Markdown documentation for not being an unambiguous specification. Gruber never claimed the documentation to be unambigious, it’s more of a users guide.

And we don’t claim that he claimed it was unambiguous. We are just pointing to problems caused by the fact that it leaves many important things unspecified.

The tool however is unambigious, even though it’s written in a language that’s hard to read.

I don’t think even Gruber would claim that Markdown.pl is authoritative in cases where his syntax description fails to give guidance. If it is, then Markdown is a very weird syntax indeed. For example, it counts this as a nested ordered list, with ‘two’ a sublist of ‘one’:

  1. one

2.  two

Furthermore, more recent writings have continued this tone of blaming Gruber rather than acknowleding his contribution, e.g:

"And yes, Gruber has caused fragmentation "… “If he had exhibited leadership” … “then there would have been no need for this effort.”

All proper respect to John Gruber for his valuable contributions! But I think the statements here are plainly true, and they merely respond to your earlier claim that he is not responsible for fragmentation. He can certainly do what he wants with his project. If he is content with a loose description of the syntax, that’s fine. If he wants to let the garden grow as it will, without providing guidance to implementers who ask for it, that’s also fine. But it is a predictable result that a garden so tended will become untidy, that people will begin to trip on the weeds, and that there will be a call for a cleanup.

I am not responsible for the text on the website to which you object, but personally I’d have no problem revising it (and the spec) a bit. You have to remember that we have very limited time, and there have been more pressing things to work on.

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john macfarlane has given years worth of
respect to markdown, and thus john gruber, in
blood, sweat, and tears (well, sweat, anyway,
i’m not sure about the blood or the tears), so
he has fully earned his right to speak freely.

without anyone calling him out on it. at all.

that’s my opinion, anyway, and i’m expressing it.

-bowerbird

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I think part of that stems from the ambiguity that was mentioned: Is Markdown a language or a tool? In essence, Markdown is what Gruber made to write his blog. CommonMark is not Markdown. GitHub flavored Markdown is not Markdown. Both are derivates from the original language, maybe comparable to how ANSI C used K&R C as a starting point and cleaned it up but in doing so created an incompatible version of it.

In a way, I wish that the internet would move away from the name Markdown, and this project kinda did (cause it had to) - it’s not Markdown, it’s CommonMark, a well specified markup language inspired by Markdown.

What Gruber could’ve or should’ve done doesn’t really matter now, since Markdown works well enough for Gruber to run his website, and if other people see issue with it, well, the license is very generous and allows the kind of forking that people did.

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I don’t want to argue; nor would I feel qualified to argue with @jgm. Yet I’m literally confused in trying to parse the sentence with five commas.

As a potential contributor to the project, and with my commercial software background, licenses matter to me more than blank lines. So I would ask further clarification on this so that I can determine for myself how to properly license and attribute any works I might derive from your work.

I’ll apologize in advance for the directness of my questions, I’m simply trying to resolve ambiguity in my interpretation. If you think I’m revisiting questions asked and answered in the past, perhaps you can point me to where they have been answered.

  • Do you acknowledge past acceptance of the terms of Gruber’s Markdown license restricting use of the word Markdown?

  • Are you saying that since you consider your work not to be a derivative of Grubers, that somehow puts it outside the scope of any agreement to Grubers unique 3rd clause?

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+++ Burt_Harris [Sep 26 14 13:11 ]:

  • Do you acknowledge past acceptance of the terms of Gruber’s Markdown license restricting use of the word Markdown?

  • Are you saying that since you consider your work not to be a derivative of Grubers, that somehow puts it outside the scope of any agreement to Grubers unique 3rd clause?

Gruber’s license explicitly applies only to derivative work: “Neither
the name “Markdown” nor the names of its contributors may be used to
endorse or promote products DERIVED FROM THIS SOFTWARE without specific
prior written permission.” So, since our work is not derived from
Gruber’s software, the clause does not apply to it.

But this is a non-issue now, as we have decided to rename the
project as CommonMark.

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That makes your position clear to me now, but it leaves me feeling quite uncomfortable and feeling a need to distance myself. I literally never imagined you would be arguing that the spec was not derived from Grubers’s works, particularly given this sentence in the spec:

###1.3 About this document
This document attempts to specify Markdown syntax unambiguously…

In my mind, this is not about applying some legal test for a derivative work, because the accepted legal tests change over time as do the media available for expression. This is more a matter of intellectual honesty than law.

Copyrights protect expressions of ideas, but not the underlying idea. The idea of a lightweight markup language is not protected by Gruber’s copyright assertion, but the way he expressed the idea is. That form of expression included the concrete syntax of Markdown, which is common to both the prose and Perl he released under his 2004 license, in a single software package.

The concrete syntax of a markup language includes bindings of specific glyphs to formatting concepts like emphasis, headings, and lists. In creating his works (CommonMark, stmd and others) @jgm could have, without loss of utility, chosen an entirely different set of mappings from glyphs to formatting. He did not, and as a result my interest and participation in CommonMark discussions have been motivated by what I perceived to be intellectual honesty of the first sentence in paragraph 1.3, and elsewhere, not by the pure utility or price of the stmd implementation. Changing that now would be like bait and switch.

Translation of a work into another language, summarizing a work, adding detail or editorial comment, or even defacing it can all be considered both new works (allowing new copyright protection to start) and simultaneously derivative works. There is nothing wrong with creating something derived from a copyrighted work when the original author has licensed you to do so, as John Gruber did broadly and explicitly in December 2004, but abiding by the terms of the license remains an ongoing duty of the licensee.

So what troubles me now is @jgm’s motivation for asserting the CommonMark specification is not a derivative work, when it so clearly copies the concrete syntax of Markdown.

Furthermore I disagree with his assertion that “this is a non-issue now, as we have decided to rename the project as CommonMark”, specifically because he’s used this argument of non-derivative nature of his work. It is still very much an issue, at least in my mind.

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+++ Burt_Harris [Sep 27 14 14:54 ]:

In my mind, this is not about applying some legal test for a derivative work, because accepted the legal tests change over time. This is more a matter of intellectual honesty.

Intellectual honesty requires giving credit for ideas you use. We have done that in the normal way, acknowledging John Gruber as the creator of Markdown, citing his syntax description, etc.

Licenses and copyright concern specific legal issues. So, here it is precisely a legal question, whether our work is “derivative” from Gruber’s.

Copyrights protect not ideas, but expressions of ideas. The idea of a lightweight markup language is not protected by Gruber’s copyright assertion, but the way he expressed the idea is. That form of expression expression included the concrete syntax of Markdown, which is common to both the prose and Perl he released under 2004 under license.

I would think that the “idea” is not that of “a lightweight markup language” (which is certainly not Gruber’s idea), but Markdown syntax – the specific combination of conventions for indicating structure in plain text. Gruber’s expression of the idea is the Perl script and the documentation. So the relevant question is whether our work is derivative from these. I think it is not. The fact that our work employs the same conventions for plain-text formatting is not sufficient to show that it is derivative from Gruber’s expressions of the idea, since this just reflects that fact that they are expressions of the same idea.

Consider this analogy. A mathematician, Smith, publishes a paper describing a new kind of mathemical structure that hasn’t been studied before – call it a “commutative foobar group” – by putting together some properties or axioms. (“A commutative foobar group is a commutative group that has properties X, Y, and Z.”) Other mathematicians can write papers about commutative foobar groups, and (by the norms of academic discourse) they should cite Smith for the idea. It would be plagiarism for someone else to claim to present commutative foobar groups as if they were their own original idea. However, nobody would claim that, just by discussing commutative foobar groups, proving things about them, and discussing variants like non-commutative foobar groups, their papers infringe Smith’s copyright.

Another interesting analogy is with typefaces, which aren’t copyrightable in the US. Fonts, which are essentially computer programs for rendering letters according to a typeface, are copyrightable, in the same way as other computer programs. But the abstract letter shapes that make up a typeface are not. Apparently the legal basis for this has to do with their “utilitarian purpose”; if they had been ruled to be works of art, they would have been copyrightable. It seems to me that Markdown syntax clearly has utilitarian purpose, and would naturally fall into the same category as typefaces.

Note also that most or all of the elements of Markdown syntax were already in wide use as conventions for formatting plain-text emails and contributions to usenet groups. (A few others came from earlier light markup systems, such as Setext and ATX.)

I’m not a lawyer, and I’m guessing you aren’t either. And the law has enough hard-to-understand rough edges that things may be more complicated than they seem to me. But I don’t think the license was ever the real issue. John Gruber didn’t like the idea of a group representing itself as determining a canonical syntax for Markdown, because he wants to be the one to do that. I understand that desire perfectly, though I wish he had been intersted in collaborating in or leading an effort of this kind himself. In my correspondence with him the name was the central issue, and he was satisfied when we changed it.

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You seem to resort to the fallacy of distraction in arguing your point, which doesn’t help address the problem this topic was meant to address: the tone of the rhetoric.

For example, the fact that I’m not an attorney is irrelevant, I’m well represented, and my attorney already made his advice clear, saying:

If you want the legal precedent clarifying the boundary between idea and expression, it’s actually very easy to find, even for a layman, but I’ll not argue the distinction with you further.

The real question here has to do with motivation. Why you would continue to argue your work is non-derivative using irrelevant facts rather than simply acknowledge Gruber in the license and change your wording to meet commonly accepted “fair use” legal guidance still escapes me.

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john macfarlane said:

John Gruber didn’t like the idea of
a group representing itself as
determining a canonical syntax for Markdown,
because he wants to be the one to do that.

it floors me how y’all continue to fail to grok this.

it’s not that gruber “wants to be the one to do that”.

it’s that he doesn’t want that to be done at all.

and the reason he doesn’t want “a canonical syntax
for markdown” is so that everyone can roll their own.

whether anyone else thinks that is desirable, or not,
at least we can show enough intellectual ability to
grasp that that is what the issue revolves around.

-bowerbird

p.s. burt, it seems you have far too many questions
about the direction of this project to stick around on it.

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I haven’t seen any convincing argument that our work is derivative from Gruber’s, and I’m not going to say that it is unless I’m persuaded otherwise. (And the legal notion of “fair use” only comes in if it is derivative work.)

However, I am happy to respect John Gruber’s wish that “Markdown” not be used as a generic name. Our spec should define the syntax it is describing as “CommonMark,” not “Markdown.” Hence (as I’ve suggested before) I’d be in favor of certain changes to the wording of the landing page and the spec itself. In particular, I would suggest wholly rewriting the following paragraph on the landing page:

We propose a standard, unambiguous syntax specification for Markdown, along with a suite of comprehensive tests to validate Markdown implementations against this specification. We believe this is necessary, even essential, for the future of Markdown.

Also 1.3 of the spec should be changed

This document attempts to specify Markdown syntax unambiguously

and some wording should be added introducing the notion of “CommonMark.”

In the spec itself, some occurrences of “Markdown” should be replaced by “CommonMark” (e.g. in the intro to section 4), although others will need to remain, since they are parts of historical discussions of Markdown and various implementations of it. The introductory section, pointing out various unclarities in Gruber’s syntax description, should certainly remain, as it explains the motivation for the project.

As I mentioned before, we are still playing catch-up with the name change, and because of other commitments I haven’t been able to devote much time to this project in the last few weeks.

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Burt,

Gruber would rather CommonMark not be considered “derivative,” but rather “inspired” by Markdown, the way Markdown was inspired by Textile. He really has no interest in any claim to, or credit for, the new language. He only wants to defend the name and identity of his Markdown.

Therefore, I don’t think Gruber shares your concerns.

The way I see it, there’s a long tradition of computer languages inspiring successors and even knock-offs without any moral or legal issues (though legal issues do arise occasionally when corporate interests are involved).

– David

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I guess you missed it, @Burt_Harris, but this was all discussed to death about 4 weeks ago.

Any future topics on this will be closed.