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Company Takes Over Well-Known OSS Developer's Name Because the Domain Was Free

Posted by msmash on from the messy-situations dept.

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.

3 of 99 comments (clear)

  1. Use your real name, not a handle by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Better yet, use your real name.

    (Not following my own advice here. Posting as AC simply because I don't want a Slashdot account.)

  2. There's another way to protect a brand by omnichad · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  3. And? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.