Imagine if you took a look at all the incompatible implementations of 1970's and 1980's C and blamed them for not being compatible, and created a fork called "ANSI C".
That'd totally suck, wouldn't it?
That'd totally suck, wouldn't it?
Honestly, I'm of the opinion that they can call it Standard Markdown if they want to and there's nothing wrong with that. Gruber's opinion is worth something for sure because of his authorship of the original, but there's a statute of limitations. He doesn't think Markdown needs anything more than his Perl script, but the rest of the internet has disagreed pretty strongly for long enough now that it's fine to treat him as absentee.
I don't really see this as a valid comparison to what the folks behind "Standard Markdown" are doing. I agree with others that the Standard Markdown name was a poor choice. For me at least, it feels like they are saying "We're taking over now". I don't know if that indeed was their intent, but that's the way it comes across to me. I think they should choose a different name.
For the record, I really don't have any skin in the game here, as the controversy doesn't really affect me much.
Which the "non-profit national standards committee" is just a collection of folks representing firms in the industries to which the standards apply.