Many people seem to be missing something that feels important to me: the "let's spec Markdown" folks sent an email to Gruber saying "we want to call our project 'Standard Flavored Markdown'". This name was arguably analogous to "GitHub Flavored Markdown", which Gruber apparently had previously indicated he was OK with. When Gruber hadn't replied after 2 weeks, the spec folks assumed that meant he was OK with their proposed name, and went ahead and announced ... "Standard Markdown" (without the softening "Flavored"). With no advanced notice whatsoever to Gruber. I'd be pretty pissed too at being blind-sided like that.
Think about the difference between "Standard Flavored Markedown" (which implies there are other flavors out there, this one is just attempting to be more standardized than others) and "Standard Markdown", which implies this is The one-and-only standard version of Markdown.
Think about the difference between "Standard Flavored Markedown" (which implies there are other flavors out there, this one is just attempting to be more standardized than others) and "Standard Markdown", which implies this is The one-and-only standard version of Markdown.