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OpenDomain.org owner: Selfless FOSS helper or domain squatter?
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| Johnson is a consultant and developer who uses Microsoft products to code. He
| says he wants to "break into the open source world," but doesn't have the
| skills. He says he decided to give to open source in his own way: by
| purchasing domain names and providing free use of them to worthy open source
| projects. Johnson says he is an "anti-squatter," purchasing domains for
| hundreds of dollars and protecting them from misuse. He asks nothing in
| return except an acknowledgment and a link to opendomain.org on every page of
| the sites he licenses.
|
| [...]
|
| Mullenweg, who had no comment for Linux.com, convinced Johnson to hand the
| domain over to him. "After I gave it to him, he sued me," Johnson says. "I
| spent a hell of a lot of money on that domain and $30,000 more on lawyers."
| Mullenweg refused to comment.
|
| Johnson admits he made a mistake with the WordPress affair. "He was
| completely right. He owned the idea of WordPress and I didn't understand that
| at the time. I think we could have worked it out better." Since that
| misunderstanding, it seems Johnson has changed his tack with regard to
| donating domain names to open source projects.
|
| [...]
|
| "I thought I was doing something good with Matt. All my advisors starting
| saying, 'Hey this is great,' so in the midst of that we bought drupal.com."
| The Drupal community reacted with disdain when it found out that Johnson had
| registered drupal.com. "Everybody in the community hated me," Johnson says."
|
| "They want to piggy-back on the great reputation of Drupal to get their link
| on high traffic, high page-rank sites," wrote a forum member at
| drupal.org. "And they want to do it under the guise of 'open.' What is so
| open about cybersquatting a domain, then 'benevolently' allowing the people
| who are busy making the domain valuable to use it..."
|
| Johnson says it took a bit of explaining. "When I talked to Dries Buytaert
| [Drupal's creator and original project leader] he was originally like, 'OK,
| what are you trying to do? OK, you're contributing in a different way, but
| you're still contributing." Johnson ended up transferring ownership of
| drupal.com to Buytaert, and the domain sits unused, though Buytaert commented
| in a press release that he was "very grateful" for the contribution.
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http://www.linux.com/feature/140576
Another leech:
EU tells UK to deal with Phorm - or else
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| The European Commission has sent a message to the British government, and it
| reads something like this: "If you don't deal with Phorm, we will."
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http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/16/eu_warns_uk_over_phorm/
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