

Open Source Obligations - bensummers
http://www.red-sweater.com/blog/1078/open-source-obligations

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alextgordon
In case you missed it, Jeff replies in the comments: [http://www.red-
sweater.com/blog/1078/open-source-obligations...](http://www.red-
sweater.com/blog/1078/open-source-obligations#comment-151941)

I think the moral of the story is, "Don't feed the troll". I'm not sure if
Jeff is deliberately provocative in his posts, but many of them _do_ turn out
that way, and you can bet he gets a lot of ad revenue from the publicity.

~~~
bmj
It strikes me that perhaps Mr. Gruber can't win here--either he's too lax as a
project parent, or he rules the project with an iron fist, and gets complaints
because he's not flexible enough.

~~~
nailer
Being involved in an Open Source project is expected for anyone that wants
other people to use the code - implicit in publishing it. It doesn't imply
working for free when asked, but it does require responding to email even if
it's just to say 'sorry, I'm really busy right now'.

If he rules the project with an iron fist, that's still much better. People
know if the project is alive or not, and can make the decision to fork the
project easily.

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mtts
Cute. But it misses an important point in Jeff Atwood's original post, which
was that John Gruber got actively hostile when someone else extended his
Markdown code in a way he didn't approve of. If nothing else that was in poor
taste.

~~~
brown9-2
When you put that quote in it's proper context, it doesn't sound 'hostile' at
all: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1020864>

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antirez
I think the problem with markdown is that it's too complex to write a good
parser in a few lines of code, otherwise there would be no "open source
obligations" issues at all, because what is really needed in a markup system
is that it is widely accepted, all the rest will follow, _unless_ the format
is so complex to implement well that most of the implementations will be
hacks.

I also don't like how it looks from the human point of view, but this is just
my opinion and I guess it's not very common as my feeling is that most people
love markdown.

Given that this is the standard de facto at this point I guess that what's
really needed is to write an high quality, fast, simple, reference
implementation written in an algol-like language (guess what? The good Haskell
implementation does not qualify), and share it under a BSD license so that it
will be both the specification and the reference implementation everybody will
use to derivate their Python / Ruby / C / ... solid implementations of
markdown.

This is the perfect project to emerge in the coding community with little
efforts if you are smart. It's a few days of work and it is very useful to
many people, so what are you waiting for? :) Get some coffee and start coding
now instead to waste all your time on hacker news! Then setup a page for your
code and write a blog article explaining what are the hard part and tradeoffs
about implementing markdown, and possibly how markdown could be enhanced.
Don't worry, most of us understand that what you produced is FREE and will
just praise you, without obligations ;)

~~~
silentbicycle
Actually, Discount (<http://www.pell.portland.or.us/~orc/Code/discount/>) has
been around for a while, and is rather high quality. It's a C library, but has
a very simple API and should be easy to wrap in any language with a halfway
decent FFI.

Oh, and BSD license? Yup.

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andrewtj
Seems to me as an ignoramus to these goings on that part of the impediment to
progress is ambiguously named forks of the spec. For instance MarkdownSharp on
the face of it isn't just a reimplementation of Markdown in C#, it's a fork of
it. As someone who doesn't know C# were I to do an implementation of Markdown
I'm not likely to look for improvements in something called MarkdownSharp.

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mcantelon
Has Jeff Atwood contributed any open source code? Given that he's criticized
Gruber for not giving enough, I'm curious as to his own contributions (on
Github, his codinghorror account contains no repos or activities: most likely
a placeholder to prevent name squatting).

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zby
Completely aside from this flamequest: I am sure at some point OS authors will
start putting some promises about how they'll conduct their projects. Not
because it's their duty - but because it can make the code more useful.

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billswift
The problem with forking is that you can end up with a situation similar to
the UNIX Wars of the eighties and early nineties with multiple, not-quite-
interfunctional versions. That almost killed UNIX and could more easily do it
to a minor program like Markdown.

