Markdown licensing

[david scotson]

On Mon, 13 Dec 2004 09:32:53 +0000, european bob <bob at wolfwall.com> wrote:
>
> (First thought is; is this change for change's sake? Or is there
> actually some evidence people need a licence change?)

I was recently looking into the Ruby implementations of Markdown and
read a comment where someone (reluctantly) chose RedCloth (primarily
Textile) over BlueCloth (Markdown) for licensing reasons.
 
> 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.

This problem (and a few others) would, I think, be solved by a
comprehensive test suite, which I believe is in the works. This would
flag up where people have deviated from the 'spec' (Perl Markdown by
default I assume) wether intentionally or not.

In conjunction with this, perhaps asking people not to use the name
Markdown unless they intend to be 100% compatible is an option? I
believe Java does something like this, though they probably use a
heavy-handed legal approach rather than just rely on social
conventions and politeness, which may be enough in this case.

regards,

dave scotson