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Who Bought Linux.Net?
So Fred VanKampen (who has to hold the record for most money made by reselling two domain names) e-mailed us to say that the Domain Name for 'Linux.Net' has been sold. He won't say to whom, but it supposedly will be announced at LinuxWorld next week. Of course we have no idea what he got for the entry, but the rumors were that he made several million when he sold Linux.com to
VA Linux. Hopefully he'll take me for a ride in his yacht. ;)
Microsoft, for use in their upcoming "Windows 2000 is a better Linux than Linux itself" campaign.
Going to Linux.net will forward to www.microsoft.com/windows2000/
Gates will smile as he makes Linux.net his browser's startup page. Ballmer will break out in hysterical laugh as it is announced.
The battle lines are drawn...
EverCode
First of all, his name is spelled "Fred N. van Kempen". Fred is his first name, N. is his middle initial, and "van Kempen" is his last name.
/usr/src/linux/* /etc/*'. He was a primary coder of Minix, a student of Andrew Tanenbaum. He wrote parts of its networking subsystem including the NE2000 driver which became Donald Becker's template for Linux's NE2000 driver which is the template for every Linux ethernet device driver I've ever seen, which are all sitting atop the networking subsystem that is at least squarely based on or a rewrite of Linux's NET2 (the network subsystem of around kernel 1.0 to 2.0) which he also largely pioneered from inception to production. He's contributed to many elements of unix-like systems because of being at the right place at the right time when much of unix was purely grassroots, and sticking with it even in a time and place where it was not profitable (almost literally starving student).
It seems to be that out of all the contention over the sale of linux.com and linux.net, the most rational response has been that Fred should donate at least part of the money to free software.
Where would you suggest that he send money, and why? What would you have done with the money? Maybe it even makes material sense since he'd be taxed on it anyway.
I'll pass your comments on to him the next time I see him before he leaves the U.S. He's not feeling very well.
And finally, like a few people have mentioned, get a clue about his contributions by grepping some source code. 'rgrep -i kempen
I've seen his name in SunOS 5.7 config files. He's got the source code of every revision of unix and most other types of OS's ever, and has just installed BSD on his "new" PDP in his office in Holland.
The point is that foolz who bust their asses to make the best software the world can handle, should be able to eventually be very comfortable. Just like when you get a degree and graduate. Fred coordinated live production testing of Linux's NET2 among European universities while he was developing it. Ever wonder how come suddenly Linux broke out of almost total obscurity around kernel 1.0.9 and 1.2.13 and hit the ground running, knocking commercial competitors down left and right? You don't come by this kind of community-oriented obsessive talent every day. If you haven't coded your own underground open-standard OS's (plural), for years without pay, on its own merit, while in production testing, and innovating on the world's collective established body of work along the way, and helping build companies to publish and reward the work of others, bite your tongue. Without these things, Linux would not exist.
And all this insane materialism in the world of free software has done to him is that now he bought his first car since forever, and one of those really expensive Mavica digital cameras! He's a true classic Dutch gentleman with impeccable manners and a tremendous sense of humor under any situation, who buys dinner for his friends at the local grill.
Yes, he went on to more commercial stuff after school (he originally had a degree in accounting), but you really should understand the economics of the land of Holland first. Although he and I might still have some discrepancies on the ethics of using Microsoft software anywhere for any reason, it's essentially roughly *similar* to what many other free software heavyweight contenders have done after their initial university-subsidized nirvana. Linus, the celebrity engineers of VA, etc, all ride atop a cloud of extreme commercialism and secrecy.
We're in a world that's still trying to figure out how to put down its bombs...material means are still developing.
That material/practical/profit part of our community, as it develops into its own industry, is a LONG TERM work in progress.
So is Fred's professional direction, so make some more specific and productive suggestions about post-sale proceeds. I think you guys will be pleasantly flabbergasted at what's already cooking inside his goofy head. (uh, that was supposed to sound like a good thing.)
Now see what you Slashdottian hotheads have done? You guys done worked me up to where I'm making runon sentences! I have a pseudo-intellectually verbose nature which suits Slashdot just fine, as long as we keep from being self-righteous and stick with the Good of the Code.
Has anybody considered the possibility that Andover.net would consider buying the linux.net domain? It would make a good fit for their most profitable businesses, and would probably make their stock price jump.
"The Linux Network" says a lot more than "Andover Net", besides, look at their index page and see that they are calling themselves "The Leading Linux Desination" so it's a fit.
Don't be too surprised if I'm right!
-rt-
** Evil Canadians are taking over the world. Learn about the conspiracy
I'm not sure whether this is good or bad. One one hand, I'm don;t like people registering domains that may be useful later and then not using then for anything. That's just mean. On the other hand, this is a free market economy, and people should be able to"buy low, sell high." So, I'm relly not sure where I stand.
-mark
-mark
If your computer says LINUX, run...computers can't talk! [unless you have text-speech software]
I Just Don't Get It (tm).
How is this different from the recent SeriousDomains.com auction that was stopped by Linus? Is he getting a share out of this, or what?
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Play Match-It.
I don't think is the same thing that (for exampl) domainbank does. So go easy onhim.
-- Slashdot sucks.
If the answer is "yes", then they are not squatting. The domain is theirs to do with as they please.
I don't know the people involved, so I have no opinion on this.
While VanKampen's goal of protecting the name may seem laudable, that role is not his to play. Linus owns the trademark rights to "Linux" - as long as the linux.net domain is going to be used in relation to the Linus OS, VanKampen cannot use the domain name without permission from Linus.
My -assumption- is that he -does- have such permission (as will the party to whom it is sold), but for VanKampen, rather than Linus, to retain the proceeds from the sale of the domain name may do serious damage to Linus' trademark rights - as a requirement for protecting those rights is control over the name. Linus cannot claim to control the use of the name if VanKampen is entitled to control the proceeds of the sale of a domain name that he cannot legally use without permission from Linus. VanKampen can only be holding linux.net as an implicit or explicit licensee of Linus, not as a rightful owner.
Once a technology has reached that point in its lifecycle where domain name deals, buyouts, IPOs and the like are the chief means of progress, that technology has ceased to be interesting from a technological standpoint.
Corollary #1: Slashdot is now a business page. Expect deals like this to be praised without question.
Corollary #2: Prepare for a massive cultural shift this year. The technically inclined will be moving on to something else very soon.
:Michael
The question should not be who owns a domain, but what the ownder does with the domain.
The web site at domain X should be consistent with the domain name, at least for generic names. People surf to a generic domain, like linux.com, either because they hope the site will have good resources for things in that category, or because the domain is easy to find. They do not expect or want the message "This site is for sale" or anything to that effect.
People who buy generic domains with the intent of resale have the duty, at least to provide links to sites that provide the sort of information their domain name implies. This is not to say that they should be forced to, just that it is the right thing to do, and that the more useful their domain is, even just as a set of links, the more desirable the domain becomes. Without content, any domain becomes less desirable.
I'll just tell you now.. I bought linux.net
I dont understand what all the fuss is. We here at the Leasing Impregnated Nuns with Unmarred Xylophones network are very excited about our upcoming IPO. There is a huge untapped market in pregnant nuns and their clean xylophones. We've already been drowned in orders!
So, please, make sure you grab some of our stock when we begin our IPO. (symbol INUX) You won't regret it!
More to the point, does his inaction on this constitute failure to defend his trademark? If some half-wit judge thinks so, he could lose control over the name Linux.
0 1 - just my two bits
I have known fred for many years, he is NOT a nice guy. He got fired from infomagic for having a hard drive full of porn, and the last time I talked to him (about a year ago) he said he 'regretted doing any work on Linux, cos it sucks' (that isnt word for word, but that was the gist of the conversation).
Or, just perhaps, it should go to Fred van Kempen. It would be a fitting reward for the splendid work he did on NET2. Without his work, Linux wouldn't be where it is today, so it seems only right that he should reap some of the profits as well.
Perhaps InterNIC or whatever company replaces them could link disputed domain names to a list of the sites that have registered them.
First problem: For a $50 registration fee, by registering "diamond.com" you've just required InterNIC to put up a redirecting web server for a year. That'll run a lot more than $50.
Second problem: If this were allowed, how many people do you think would register "microsoft.com" and other well-hated sites in an attempt to bury the original site in a sea of alternate registrant links?
Third problem: You're thinking too web-centric. "diamond.com" may have a web server, or it may be the central domain for 10,000 net-connected computers at Diamond Multimedia's offices. You're going to conscript that domain and make a change costing Diamond thousands of dollars, just because someone else paid $50 for a cool domain name? What about email addresses? Where does mail to root@diamond.com get sent? What happens when someone else registers hotmail.com? What happens when some non-HTTP protocol becomes the most important thing on the net, or when diamond.com turns out to be running more FTP than web traffic, or when it's the domain name for some chat server or something else that needs a unique IP?
Fourth problem: What about preexisting links? For $50, you say I can register microsoft.com, require the site to change into a redirection page, and thus break every existing http://*.microsoft.com/* link? Sweet.
Well, there's more, but you get the picture. Anyone have any more ideas?
Frankly, I'd be fine with allowing companies to override previous registrants of existing trademarks (but even then, what if the domain name is a trademark for different companies in different industries?), but that's about as much as I'd stretch it. If you had your heart set on anonymouscoward.com, and whois tells you that Cybernet2000 has already registered it (damn!), then you'd better either suck it up and pay what they want, or get a new domain name.
In this article's particular case, I'd have been OK with it if Linus had decided to enforce his trademark and prohibit anyone else from "squatting"... but it's *his* choice. The original linux.net owner is an old time kernel developer, did a good job selling linux.com, and if Linus doesn't have a problem with his getting rich off the domain names then certainly nobody else has a right to.
I might have thought at one time that selling the linux* domain names would be a good way for Linus to make money himself while coding free software... but of course now that he's slated to become a bajillionaire over the next decade on Transmeta stock options that's not really necessary.
I don't know where you're from but in the U.S. free speech isn't all or nothing. There are areas not protected by free speech laws e.g. obscenity (which is relative and thus difficult to define), libel, slander and provocative speech. Let's also not forget the infamous shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater.
In life nothing is black and white unless it's a cartoon in a newspaper. I'm not sure exactly what is meant by an "ethical squatter" but I can comment on the linux.com sale. Linus owns the trademark, he can permit it be used as he sees fit as long as he indicates it is occuring with his permission. He risks losing it if he let's it used without taking any action (like Xerox and Frisbee) but as long as he acknowledges that it has occured all is well.
...but linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds right?
didn't he also say that he registered the name to prevent this kind of profiteering?
perhaps the money raised by Fred VanKampen should go into some foundation.
stty erase ^H
Just promise to take CmdrTaco for a ride in your yacht.
We have evidence that this particular fellow is an ethical squatter -- he bought up linux.com way back when in order to prevent unsavory types from abusing it, and then he sold it to the company with the best vision of how to turn it into a useful site for the community as a whole (and not just for a particular company's products or distribution). In particular, we're pretty sure that he even turned down some higher offers than the one he eventually took from VA, because he thought that VA had the better vision -- not an approach the typical squatter would take.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Even I have been getting crazy to buy my domain freeos.com but I have decided not to sell it and instead make it the resource center for free operating systems.
Prakash
Prakash
FreeOS.com - The resource center for free operating systems.
I'd personally be happy if the 3letter TLDs would have a lot more granularity instead of just "commercial", "network" and "organisation" (and some others...) How about "OS:Linux:Development"? Would make searching way simpler too :)
In fact, I fail to see why people are ready to pay ridiculos amounts of money for a combination of letters. So VA Linux would have domain valinux.com istead of linux.com, what's bad? If companies wouldn't create such a fuss over this, they won't have to pay so many money, and the money could possibly go to something that is really important.
Another thing I fail to see is why someone is allowed to sell "linux" domain names while TM on "Linux" belongs to Linus? Why his lawyers won't do the same thing that etoys lawers did? Why someone should make big bucks on Linux, giving absolutely nothing to Linux and just getting in the way of people who really do something?
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
Exactly how would you register domain names? When a user types "diamond.com" (or the Real Name "diamond", or "diamond" in whatever dumbass scheme could replace DNS), it's got to go somewhere. How would you decide where it goes? Highest bidder? A government agency? I'm genuinely curious; I can't think of anything better than "first come first served". It seems to me like 50% of the complaints about the current "first come, first served" scheme come from clueless companies who didn't figure out that "that Internet thing" might be important until last year, by which time their name had been registered as a .com long ago.
Although I do agree with your description of the situation, I still believe that there should an intermediate "squatting category" for people like VanKampen: "Semi-selfish squatting".
:-)
Obviously the guy had some ethical principles or he'd had taken the highest offer for the domains he squatted. Nevertheless good old greed got the better of him. Or more likely, the millions of US$'s for the lesser offers were enough to satisfy his greed while allowing him to still look at his old geek friends in the eye, and himself in the mirror.
I'm very surprised that Linus let this thing go through in the first place because it's about first level domains with his trademark on the line as a trading article.
Let's face it - money corrupts ideals. I'm afraid we can already see it starting in the "Distro Wars" threads here and in other discussions everywhere. Whenever I see mindless drivel claiming that one distro or another is "crap" I begin wondering whether that guy is just a pitiful speculator/investor in "another camp". This explanation used to only apply to the Microsoft defenders in the past, but unfortunately this behaviour can only worsen as companies such as Caldera, SuSE and TurboLinux launch their IPO's. Unlike Red Hat, these companies are not going to "GPL everything" and I suspect that the ensuing competition based on proprietary components will leave its mark.
Folks, we need LSB and distro-neutrality not "distro-hate". We must also discourage companies from relying on prorietary and exclusionary features, esp. where basic operations and interoperability is concerned.
Oops, I admit straying off topic towards the end although it's still all about money, ethics and greed. Please moderate gently.
If it was legal I'd put _here_ a link to J J Cale's "Money talks"...
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
I'm not sure that it is possible to have an independent committee, anymore. People have to make a living, and in their workday they will be involved with companies that have a stake in things going one way or another. Not to say that people can't be objective, but we're all human. There are clearly a lot of power shifts going on, and a lot of shifting influences, with a lot at stake. There also seems to be a naivete or unwillingness to look at things with the same independent thought we used to see here.
For example, it is clear that some people view any purchase of domain names whatsoever, for purposes other than building a single site, to be unacceptable. Other people believe that it is okay to see trends and buy and sell domain names like any other assets. It's okay to agree to disagree. But does a philosophical difference, or should a philosophical difference prevent the use and development and sale of those names for Linux businesses? I don't think so.
In the trademark situation, the fundamental issue should be whether or not a name or a site using that name (porn, Microsoft lovefest, etc.) violates or denigrates the mark. A name which has in no way done either, should not be dismissed, nor should it be removed from the market by all intents and purposes, because you're worried it might be misused, or because you don't like the person (or assume you won't like the person, since you don't know the person), in my example. I have no doubt that LinuxStinks.com would have been allowed to continue to exist. And when a user community was built up for that, would have been allowed to be sold, too. So what is the difference? The difference is that I was an unknown, and suspect because I was unknown. In our self-righteous rantings about other things and other sectors here, we call that bigotry.
Suppose that Somebody is in charge of the GoldPan, a phenomenally successful way to extract gold from them thar hills. Suppose Somebody lets all their friends and even lots of strangers try their hand at using the GoldPan and even shows them great ways to use it. Several people create neat little accessories that make it even more efficient. Everybody gets very excited about the GoldPan and all the opportunities on the them thar hills. Then, one day, on the new ship in from Afar, Stranger arrives and buys a vein that Everybody had ignored until then, and sets up several camps along the vein and says "All welcome. Come and try your hand at my vein. Use this neat GoldPan that everybody's using. But nobody's ever used it on this vein. Everybody seemed disinterested in this vein, but I think this vein holds great promise. But I'm not going to hog it all to myself. Come buy your stake."
Now does that threaten the quality of the Goldpan? No. Does it irritate Everybody who's been working different veins with the GoldPan? Some, naturally. Is it worse because the Stranger's from Afar? Is it because we're shocked that we've made open invitations to come join us in these hills, but we deep down thought nobody else would come? Or is it because we thought they would come ask permission to buy that valley before they bought their stake, because certainly nobody else would have run down and tried to stake the same claim, if they thought it might disappear. Or is it because it is really not worth anything, and we should save this guy from Afar from his own stupidity. Or is it just plain and simple we don't think anybody from Afar should have such a big stake in one vein, even if we didn't pay any attention to it before and even if they did put up the money for it. Is it because we didn't want it in the first place, and took no measures to purchase it, but now that somebody owns it, it irritates us that he wants to offer parts of it for sale? Maybe yes, yes and yes. But is it wrong? Some say yes, some say no. Should the guy be run out of town on a rail? That's what was done in the old west... or maybe found slashed in a dark alley.
Is one of the big threats that somebody might actually see value in one of those camps on that vein and spend money on it? Or is it that it was almost free for the taking only a little while ago, but now this guys got it and I wish I had gotten it, or better yet nobody got it because then we'd only have to worry about what we were working on before this guy came along? Or is it because we had this open invitation to come one and come all, but then somebody actually took us up on it, but it isn't anybody I know?
Bottom line is I staked out lots of camps in one vein of the corporate valley. I was selling domain names with Linux in them. I've encounted resentment and righteous puffery because I was an unknown, and because some people don't trust the unknown, and measures have been exclusionary because of philosophical differences. LinuxInfrastructures.com, and LinuxRollouts.com and LinusInnovation.com and LinuxBenchmarking, and most of our other Linux domain names have to do with the corporate service sector, which we've been players in, for 14 years. To say that offering domain names for sale will dilute the Linux marketplace as some have claimed is absolutely absurd. There are literally thousands of domain names for sale. To say that LinuxInfrastructures or any of my names suggest ownership of the mark is also ludicrous. To say that buying parts of a vein and then selling off some of my stakes (or at least offering them for sale) to help finance my expansion is inappropriate is also absurd. Just like an incubator in a research park, there are lots of little niches in the vein I've staked out. There are even more business incubators out there in a lot more Linux valleys and a lot more Linux veins, and all of them have a lot more money and a lot more everything then we have right now. But there are a lot of businesses out there who don't have much imagination, and if you've been a consultant for very long you know that, ten times over. Sometimes you need to build an opportunity and paint a picture until somebody gets it. And that creative image making and position staking is not only worth something, but it's an entire industry, with lots of Manhattan advertising agencies and corporate identity makers charging millions for it. And there are still thousands of domain names out there. Hundreds of thousands. It's almost the same kind of mis-enlightenment that the guy in the patent office in the early 1900's had, when he said "Everything that's ever going to be invented has already been invented." Let's get with it. Is this open source, open invitation, or not. Are legitimate business uses of Linux derivative names, including creating domain names for specific mindshare positions and then selling them like any worthy business asset, to be allowed or not?
To say that using Linux to get money is an isolated behavior for domain speculators (as in "now the use of "linux" in this case has really been a question of blocking somebody ELSE from using the term and using it to get money.") is a limited view. Linux in the name is critical to being a player, any player, in this industry. As reported in an earlier post, LinuxCare's filing says "If we fail to adequately promote and maintain our brand name or are unable to continue using "Linux" as part of our brand name, our business may be adversely affected." Yeah. Ditto.
So we're back to Is it okay to squash and block because of a philosophical difference when no wrongdoing or damage to the mark is proven? Open-minded objectivity is going to be key here. What happened to me does not, from where I'm sitting, feel like open minded, open source anything . And objective analysts in this forum, and even Linus Torvalds himself, would not support, I believe, the way I was actually treated. (see what really happened.). And while you're at it, think about this. If you had spent a lot of your hard-earned money (very very hard earned, for you get rich quick illusionists) to buy domain names that included Linux (as many, many, many people have), and if there were precedent after precedent of hundreds of sites and uses out there with Linux in the name, would you be blindsided and incredulous that some Threaten Now, Talk Never lawyer would call and suggest that you not sell the names or even remove any references to the names? Is this a free country? Is this still America? Is this an Open Community -- come one, come all? See the Penguines Parody if you have any sense of humor at all. Otherwise, the issues here and violations here are not very funny, and not very Linux-esque, or even American, for my open-minded, level-headed, non-hypocritical colleagues, who've been quietly supportive in private emails to me.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. ~Martin Luther King, Jr. from Birmingham Jail, 1963
Anybody here old enough to like Westerns or remember Louis L'Amour or even US history? You know the founding rancher who's a good guy and owns a big ranch, and builds this town, but then these new power guys come in.. the big guys, and they have a guy over here, running foreman for the Big Rancher, and everybody has to answer to the Foreman now. And there's a couple guys who work for the new Big Rancher who now owns the town, and hates nesters. New rancher comes in. Water is found. Now Big Rancher wants more of the water holes. Boys, what are we going to do with this no good. Let's call them "nesters" and kill them -- Call them "nesters" in front of everyboy over at the saloon. (These guys are so easy.) Just stir up a mob. Don't even talk to the new guy or get to know him/her. Just kill him. He has no right to that water hole. We were here first. We want it all. But don't tell anybody. What difference does it make that they filed on the land, and own title. They've got no right. Next thing you know they'll be runnin' sheep and we only like cattle around here. We never saw it before and got along fine without it, but now that we know it's there, let's kill them, and take the water hole. Now, while we've got the mob going, let's look around the town and see who else we need to get to tow the line. Perfect timing. You wanna play? Fine, but you have to deal with The Boss. Boss wouldn't like that. Well, he never complained before. Yep. But he's not running things anymore, we are, and we say what goes....
So what kind of town is this going to be, and who is going to run things? You want a town that's owned, or do you want free commerce for all. Hard work. Hard life. But a good stake not threatened by power mongers.. there's a possibility of working the land and making something good come out of it. Given a chance, and some room to play. How about it boys. What's it going to be? You snookered, or you read up the laws of the land? You cowards and lackeys or are you individualists?
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. ~Martin Luther King, Jr. from Birmingham Jail, 1963
Investing money (and thus profiting without having to work) may have positive effects, but that still doesn't make it working. Stealing can positively affect economies, but that doesn't make it working.
(Writing books *IS* work, of course, as there is product. Speculation is not, as there is none. Speculation of US land was just as bad (actually, far worse) than that of DNS names. The products of labor belong to laborers, regardless of who claims to "own" the land on which they work. Likewise with the means of production in general. The opposite position, that someone should be able to make money without working (ie be in such a situation where he could be a rock rather than a person and it would not affect his income - certainly you could not call that working, yet this state could be brought about easily by a sufficiently wealthy investor), is ridiculous.)
What did this fellow ever produce? The answer is nothing, and so should be his income for it.
(And just because most might do the same does not mean we should support it when one does.)
geez rob, you make it sound like you're still living in a box and eating tuna fish everyday, struggling to pay the electric bill.
go buy your own boat.
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http://gammatron.weblogger.com