jonschlinkert
commented
5 years ago FWIW, here is the email that spurred me to finally create this issue (this email is especially bewildering considering the fact that we just published a major version, with lots of changes!):
I get a lot of emails like this. People seem more willing to email me directly with negative comments than to say them in the open. Just something to consider when emailing maintainers.
I'm pinning this issue because this question seems to keep coming up, and it's common for people to make assumptions based on a lack of information.
First, what is this all about?
I'm writing this because lots of people seem to think that the creators of markdown-it also created this project, and that I "didn't do much" or anything at all. The markdown-it creators perpetuate this falsehood, because they don't want to have to tell the truth about what really happened, and I'm getting tired of hearing it. There is a lot more to the story than people realize, and I'd like be done with it.
I won't expand on all of the history here, but I'll give a short history. I also won't be replying to any emails or additional issues created about this. I'll either just close the issue, or delete it if it's especially negative.
Who did what, now?
markdown-it is an unofficial fork that violates the copyright of Remarkable. There is no question about that, it's a 100% irrefutable fact. Anyone who takes a stand to defend markdown-it, or who thinks that the authors of markdown-it "wrote all of the code" really has no clue about the real history, is making assumptions about what really happened, and is ignoring a lot of other details that need to be taken into consideration.
Here is the first of many emails that I received from Vitaly, the (now) creator of markdown-it:
We discussed the project at length via email, and had lots of other email correspondence throughout the development of Remarkable.
If you're curious about Remarkable, markdown-it, and "who created what, and when", it's not obvious that months of development took place on other repositories, before I was even contacted. It's not obvious that we discussed that development via email. It's not obvious that collaboration started on another project, and that afterwards we decided to move it to Remarkable, here, created as a new project, under a new name. Vitaly mentions this in the email, that Remarkable's codebase and development was already started by me, on other projects. He listed some reasons that I should consider adding him as a collaborator.
Why would he try to sell me on adding him to something that didn't exist?
It's convenient to forget that Remarkable was initially started by copy-pasting code I wrote, not to mention the dozens of other markdown libraries and parsers I published before Remarkable was created.
Even without the above information, we're developers, and we're totally fine with doing stack traces. Look at this the same way, just with a higher level issue. Ask yourself:
Or... is it possible that other developers felt like they needed to have a good reason to explain why they were kicked off of Remarkable? (hint: it has nothing to do with who wrote the code). Is it possible that the story: "markdown-it was entirely written by other developers", is a convenient way of avoiding the need to give attribution in the license and copyright. Think about the alternative. Had they been honest, it would have caused people to ask, "Why did you create a duplicate of Remarkable?" Which then creates a loop where they would either need to give an honest answer: "I was kicked off of the project for being abusive to the community". Or they would take the easy route and lie: "I wrote all of code, so it's mine! Mine!"). By sticking with the latter explanation, they don't need to honor the copyright. So the twisted logic works for them.
C'mon. Please. Don't believe what you read on the internet, t-shirts, or READMEs. Use your brain, and think about it.
Given the amount of trolling, I've strongly considered submitting a DCMA takedown to markdown-it. I’d rather not, but I’m tired of hearing about it. Not to mention, at the end of the day there are 7 billion people on Earth, and a tiny, itsy, bitsy fraction of those will have heard about any of this. Whatever negativity people think this would create would be temporary. Then markdown-it would cease to exist, and all of the new people on GitHub who had never heard of it before would keep on keeping on, and no one would even remember markdown-it or the people who created it.
I really don't want to keep going in circles about this. I will be refactoring this project soon though, and hopefully we'll be able to put this to rest for good.