Markdown licensing

[european bob]

On Mon, 2004-12-13 at 00:41 -0500, John Gruber wrote:
> If anyone has any thoughts on this, now would be the time to speak
> up.

(First thought is; is this change for change's sake? Or is there
actually some evidence people need a licence change?)

My only real concern I think would be that where the syntax is changed
(the software modified), without access to the source it would be pretty
difficult to implement a modification with bug-for-bug compatibility. I
think Markdown is pretty hard to change correctly; and certainly those
who don't really know the code or how it works will find it easy to
change the syntax in various ways which really screws up other bits of
the processing.

That, and the thought that for most web-services type people, the GPL
isn't actually much different from the BSD - hence people closing the
'web' loophole with the AGPL.

While I don't really care for licences which attempt to 'regulate'
modification in the way (for example) the Sun Java license does, I can
see there being some need for 'regulation' of the file format. It
wouldn't be good for Markdown to become the new wiki-syntax, with
everyone adding their own bits of syntax for special things and
overriding existing syntax. I would think that the GPL would give
greater scope for unification if alternate modifications did become
popular.

--bob.

PS. While I don't see the need to change from GPL to BSD, if you must
please make sure you use a BSD licence that actually is a free software
licence too - not all of them are, and it's usually a mistake to say
"BSD licence".