Slashdot Mirror
Company Takes Over Well-Known OSS Developer's Name Because the Domain Was Free
New submitter Fatalis writes: Substack is a venture capital funded startup for subscription-based newsletters, and it admittedly chose its name following the advice from a Paul Graham (co-founder of Y Combinator) article to prefer names not registered in the .com zone. The same name has also been the user handle for a prolific open-source developer who now finds themselves competing for recognition in the tech space with a capital backed company. The lesson seems to be for developers to protect their personal brand by registering a domain name with the .com extension due to it being perceived as the default.
Better yet, use your real name.
(Not following my own advice here. Posting as AC simply because I don't want a Slashdot account.)
The lesson seems to be for developers to protect their personal brand by registering a domain name with the .com extension due to it being perceived as the default.
If your handle is really a brand and important to preserve, then register it with the US Patent & Trademark Office. You can register the .com, but you don't need to in order to protect yourself. If it's not important enough for all that, then maybe your "personal brand" is not that important at all.
Or in my case a name of a sports star. However the persons name has always been tricky in the domain world.
Just if Microsoft tried to sue MikeRowe.com Because the actor MikeRowe phonically is similar.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I don't expect to own my username unless I copyright it, nor should you. Open source developers, no matter how prolific, just have handles like the rest of us open source developers and -- *shock* -- gamers.
Linked in the summary, his own public (and therefore open source) GitHub history doesn't backup being a prolific open source developer anymore and hasn't been for the past ~1.5 years. Plus I have no idea who the heck he is and I cannot tell if his real name is James Halliday, or if he took that name as a joke after Ready Player One.
Well known to you is not necessarily well known to the world. He seems like he's probably popular in the JS community, but how that makes this a remotely serious issue is still unknown to me. Copyright your name if you want to own and probably buy the .com domain while you're at it. Otherwise you clearly didn't care enough about your name to actually own it.
Now you have to make sure your new company name or product doesn't collide with a fucking internet user handle? Nope. If your handle is important enough to you, trademark it or stfu.
http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4801:qvpw13.2.1
More slashdot anti-capitalist bias on display here. Who the fuck cares if this loser lost his web page? If he refused to pay for it or didn't keep up, then he got what he deserved. End of story.
Slow news day, /. ?
The Internet is a Big Place, and just because you think you are important in your little niche, you really aren't.
"Well-known OSS developer"? Yeah, right. That and $8 will get you a coffee at Starbucks.
If he was well known or even remotely intelligent, he would have set up a company and protected this name in advance. Only fucking entitled millenials would feel sympathy for this choder.
We are talking about a JS developer. That should be end of story for /....
What's the point of specialist domains like .pizza and .ninja if people only use.com Is there a case of two notable websites sharing the same name but with different domains?
Never heard of this person. From the looks of his GitHub activity he's a web guy.
Maybe he's well-known in his field(s), but certainly no Linux Torvalds. Point is, at what point does someone achieve enough of a celebrity status for his handle to merit special attention?
Years ago, and before the iPhone and the app store, I used a handle for a variety of online accounts that happened to be the same as the name as a particular company which was unrelated to anything computers, software, or the internet. I used this handle to create an account with the Apple web site, which years later Apple later turned into a more general ID scheme that granted access to the developer tools and the ability to publish apps. Suddenly during the app boom I started getting emails about lost password changing for that account. I'm assuming the company suddenly really wanted that handle so they could make and publish iPhone and iPad apps related to their business. I would have been happy to hand it over to them if I knew how to do that, or how to even contact them. I wanted to just close the account so they could open it afresh. Try as I might, I could find no way to close my Apple account. I had friends working at Apple and they couldn't tell me how to do it. I don't think it ever occurred to Apple that anyone would ever want to do that.
I haven't used that handle in many years now, have long stopped getting the password reset request emails, and I have no idea if the company was ever successful at obtaining it.
I wish I had registered it. Though, truth be told, I also see a lot of good names listed at malwaredomains.com.
The funny thing is... I get my forum handles there, too!
Signed,
mefhgpxmncz
So they took the .com. So what? It DOES NOT MATTER that someone uses that handle elsewhere. Trademark might not have even helped -- one guy writes JS stuff, the other company does email newsletters. Yes, they are both "on computers", but what isn't these days? If 'substack' (the guy) wanted the name, he could have had it years ago for a few bucks. The fact that he didn't register it is a good indication that HE DOESN'T FUCKING CARE, ergo, no big deal.
Unless I'm missing something, HE didn't even complain -- just a few people whining in the forum that they were confused about the name. "Ooh, he wrote a package used by millions of people" -- WHO GIVES A SHIT? There are literally THOUSANDS of devs who can make that claim. And NOBODY knows their github handle or anything else about them.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
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... especially so if it is blatantly obvious that the company registered the domain in order to cash in on his name and both work in the same field. This is obvious quasi fraudulent malintent. This domain ownership would be cancelled in 5 minutes in any German court.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
He made all his money selling a bunch of CGI scripts to the idiots at Yahoo. 90% of Y-Combinator startups fail. Why would anyone take advice from this guy? I can understand if you take money from him, then you have no choice, but if you don't have to, why would you?
Exactly, protect your copyright or risk losing it...
MODDOWN! ; creimer sock puppet post again!
creimer's child bride retired military buddy suggested to him to "hide in plain site" so creimer picked up "The Fat Bastard" as his new sock puppet user name!
Yup, it's all a big SJW conspiracy with the goal to make cis white males sad.
https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/
Dave's not here man.
The attempt at manufactured controversy is transparent. If this developer ever valued that domain name at more than $10 he would have registered it. If he had the company would have a different domain.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The venture capital backed person will try and go after the original company for trademark infringement.
Make SELinux enforcing again!
In Canada, ".ca" is very common and might reasonably considered a default, because of the extensive marketing by CIRA
Imaginative contributor, terrible editors... a couple of armchair warriors shooting off in a forum is hardly news. Nothing to see here.
Not a lot to see here for sure. Submitter has one hell of an imagination.
I did like the part with the armchair warriors spouting off in a post. I gather this is the "article".