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After Years of Serving X11, X.Org Stands To Lose Its One-Letter Domain (phoronix.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The X.Org domain predates the X.Org Foundation. It was used in the '90s as a destination by The Open Group around the X Window System. While many are expecting Mir and Wayland to eventually succeed the X.Org Server, it seems the X.Org/X11 Server may outlive the valuable domain. Thanks to poor management by the X.Org Foundation, they risk losing access to their one-letter domain. Procrastination, paired with not transferring the domain when forming the non-profit foundation, has led to a last-minute mess. They left the domain registered for years to a person who is no longer involved with X.Org — and doesn't want to relinquish it. In the few days until the domain expires, they are hoping for a "Hail Mary." Let this be a lesson for open-source projects to better manage their assets.
Yeah.... I don't understand. You do not need a registrant's consent to pay for a domain renewal.
One of their fans should just pay the bill on his behalf.
Also, unless they have gone out of their way to set a registry-level lock on the domain clientRenewProhibited, then most likely ANY domain registrar could technically send an EPP request to renew the domain for 1yr, and just pay the bill.
Used to work for a hosting company and seen it happen all the time. With actual malicious intent a lot of the time - two guys start a business and one of them runs away, has the domain in his name and starts sending mails to the guy still running the business saying "~haha~ you can't have the domain!!". Other times the guy running the business just has a falling out with his IT guy. Real childish carry on, you'd think these guys were old and wise enough not to carry on like this.
Another time we had this 18 y/o guy who made sites for people and the domains were registered to his account but not under his name - the fool threatened to take the site down and keep the domain if she wouldn't go out with him
get licenses tied to their individual accounts
This is a partly corporate accounting problem, every time I have been given permission to buy software on behalf of a company they have asked me to do it with my CC and put in an expense claim. It's always the responsibility of the project/department head to manage license compliance/renewals, sucks to be them if they don't keep the license/renewal details I give them. Keeping a domain name you registered in good faith on behalf of someone else is just being a dick.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
As explained in TFA, ""The domain is currently registered in the name of X.Org Foundation LLC, which the foundation dissolved when forming the 501(c)3 organization."
I guess. Lately I think the real difference between a seasoned engineer and a "senior" engineer is just taking that extra 10% of time to do things vaguely sensibly up front. There is no such thing as temporary. At the least, set things up so refactoring them later doesn't require a total redo.
This guy in particular was just in way over his head but one of those sorts who is paranoid about admitting that or asking for help. In fact he was hostile to help. Not really part of my original point but he'd do stuff like;
- ignored my advice to not tie production services into corporate domain (if you ever get sold/acquired etc, you understand)
- ignored my advice to not create a "split domain" with the corporate domain (eg the windows domain was companyname.com, the windows dns servers thought they were SOAs but that same domain had actual internet resolvers with different records)
- refused to entertain the notion that linux was production ready (this was in 2009) and forced solaris as a standard. On x86. As vmware VMs.
- refused to take any help or assistance in installing the base OS despite being a windows guy with zero unix knowledge. We ended up with stuff like DB servers that had 2x swap as ram.. and they had 128G ram..
- For some odd reason was very hostile to the notion of service/host monitoring.. like.. not just against nagios but _anything_
The list goes on and on.
He was just really promoted way above his experience level as happens in startups; they hired me probably 8 months after him, when production databases had been wiped and backups hadn't been successful for months (back to the no monitoring thing).
It took a bunch of years to fully undo all the crap he had put in place. I danced a jig when I closed the lights on the datacenter he had built (we migrated). Did I mention in that datacenter, he setup "redundant" switches and firewalls for the servers.. but had all the internet drops coming down into one single unmanaged 1G cheapie netgear entry level switch?
If he had allowed me to help I bet he'd still be working there. I have no problems mentoring people as long as they're not asshats. Last I heard he was in law school after a stint in real estate..
I have seen this before with other open source projects. Members of the project who are developing suddenly get very paranoid of the guy who has been footing the bill for their domain or services. Even if the guy has been trustworthy and a friend of theirs for years and it has been genuinely helping the project. Something happens, like a renewal is filed at the very last minute or they receive threats from an outside party to hijack their domain. Sometimes nothing happened to trigger it.
Usually, the threats are unfounded, but paranoia and name calling sets in. People accuse the fella paying the domain host, or they're rude to him. Then some random member just demands he hand over the domain. He doesn't know if he can trust that person to handle it properly, or they aren't willing to pay for the control because let us face it they're pinko communists. This creates a lot of contention between the members and their benefactor. It recently happened at cyanogen, they're even threatening to sue the guy even though he handed over everything.
And, this psychological effect seems to extend beyond just domain control, for example Mozilla biting the hands that feeds them i.e. Google. They were being given something like roughly 80 million every year for making a free browser, and then they were telling people to switch to Bing and refusing to support Google video or image standards. Google kept funding them until recently, even though Mozilla held such contempt for them.
Many other examples exist I'm sure.