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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.
We almost lost our production domain. The original dummkopf who set things up registered it all under his own name and individual email instead of using a role based account. He then was fired for unrelated incompetence. Fast forward to the domain renewal coming up.. charge went to his personal CC.. he disputed the charges.. we would have lost it except by pure dumb luck I was in the middle of a DNS migration project and was auditing/cleaning up the registrar details. It was as last minute as you'd want; expiration was within 12h.
One of my pet peeves - people who register for services or get licenses tied to their individual accounts.
The synopsis is misleading. There is nothing like this in the article. It mentions that Leon Shiman is the current registered owner, but everything else is being kept private for the moment. He being uncooperative is just as likely as he being unreachable for contact for some reason. We'll find out in the next 11 days.
If I clone myself, can I call it a thread?
If a girl winks to us, can I call it a race condition?
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.
I'm seeing a lot of comments along the lines of "ah stupid morons, so incompetent to register a client domain using your personal credentials" which tells me these people have not worked a lot in the real world.
I can think of 5 separate occasions where I saw that the CEO, CTO, COO, CO-whoever is in charge couldn't be bothered to come up with the correct credentials or a company account to set up a simple domain for their clients. These aren't mom-and-pop shops-- major ad agencies do this all the time, movie and media companies are slightly better.
Out of desperation, either you set it up yourself, or it doesn't get done and you get fired. Explaining the legality, fragility, and idiocy of this to the people in charge of credentials is pointless-- all they hear is "blah blah blah I won't do what you want me to do"
One place I worked at EVERY TWO YEARS there was a major scramble to get a long-departed tech guy to renew a domain. Each time this happened, the day always finished thusly:"OK, let's never do that again. Give me company credentials and a billing account and I'll set this up to auto-renew".
"Sure, send me an email about it tomorrow, I gotta go play some golf".
Having been through a similar rodeo, it's just a matter of showing a different set of paperwork that shows "when orgA dissolved, all of its assets were transferred legally to orgB", at which point any representative of orgB has the same power over it because it's a transferred asset which just hasn't had some paperwork corrected at the registrar.
We'll find out in the next 11 days
You mean x11 days. Ba-da-bing!
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Yeah, someone's just trying to make drama where there isn't much. Shiman's using his own email for the contact email, and possibly his own personal phone numbers, but the registrant name is "X.ORG Foundation, LLC". Probably all it is is X.org doesn't have the credentials for the registrar account to manage the domain themselves, so they'll need to jump through the hoops with NetSol to prove they're really X.org and get the domain moved to their account. A copy of the letters of incorporation should do the trick, and accompanying it with payment should get NetSol to extend the registration while this is being cleared up.
Part of this I blame on the registrars who don't make it obvious how to set up a domain so that several registrar accounts can manage/access it, or who don't provide a way to register a domain with a new account owning it and yours just being assigned to manage it.
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.
That's how we did it back in the olden days around here.
This was a fun day when Microsoft let passport.com expire, luckily some slashdoter renewed it for them.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140921073357/http://slashdot.org/articles/99/12/25/114201_F.shtml#40
Yeah, I'm standing by just in case.
Do you have ESP?