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X.Org Might Lose Its Domain Name

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Re: X.Org Might Lose Its Domain Name

#71

Post by duskwuff »

apocalyptic0n3 wrote: post #48
duskwuff wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transferring a domain costs money (although not much); more importantly, it causes the domain to be renewed for an extra year. If the owner of the trademark doesn't want the domain to exist (e.g, if it's some off-brand use of their mark), having the domain transferred to them is counterproductive.

Just trying to understand this. Wouldn't that actually be good? Wouldn't the trademark owner want the domain so they could keep it unassigned? If they let it expire, someone could eventually purchase it and use it for similar purposes. That seems counterproductive to me, not transferring it.

> Wouldn't the trademark owner want the domain so they could keep it unassigned?

Consider a low-quality domain name like "buy-acme-widgets-cheap-123.com" (for the trademark "Acme"). There are so many possible domain names of that form that Acme Co. would have no real interest in trying to protect that specific one from being misused in the future.

Another messy situation would be if the domain name contained multiple trademarks belonging to different owners. The holder of one trademark would probably be reluctant to take ownership of a domain name which also infringed on another company's trademark!

Re: X.Org Might Lose Its Domain Name

#72

Post by derefr »

twic wrote: post #45
sliverstorm wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if they aren't closely tied to the X software package anymore, they are literally called "the X.Org Foundation". Why wouldn't they want to hang on to x.org?

I quite like the sound of xorg.org. Or perhaps they could rent x.org.org off the chap who currently owns org.org.

X.Org.info, the perfect place to find info about a project called X.Org.

Re: X.Org Might Lose Its Domain Name

#73

Post by KMag »

quonn wrote: post #65
KMag wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is subtle to non-native speakers of European languages. Experience suggests that my girlfriend, for one, would find the gp easier to read with the notations.

I'm from Europe, and I found the gp very confusing and would have understood better without the hints.

Okay, but then I presume you're implying that you're a native speaker of a European language and my statement doesn't apply to you.

I expect people who are not native speakers of English or other European languages to be helped by the annotation. My girlfriend and many of my colleagues here in Asia speak natively only East Asian languages. Some of my colleagues are native speakers of both English and one or more East Asian languages, and I don't expect that they would find the grammatical notation to be helpful to them. I also don't expect my colleague who's a native speaker of French and Chinese to be helped by the annotation, even though his English is obviously a second language. But, that's just my intuition based on living and working in East Asia.

Re: X.Org Might Lose Its Domain Name

#74

Post by gherkin0 »

nickodell wrote: post #35
viraptor wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are queueing up to take over any domain with moderate amount of traffic. Since the expiry time is public, there are lists of soon-expiring domains. This is way worse for a heavy traffic domain, and probably ridiculous for x.org.

You can't register a single-letter .org anymore.

But they are being "awarded" [1]. So if it expires, maybe they could get it back since they're a non-profit.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-level_dom...

Re: X.Org Might Lose Its Domain Name

#75

Post by KMag »

kmicklas wrote: post #63
KMag wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is subtle to non-native speakers of European languages. Experience suggests that my girlfriend, for one, would find the gp easier to read with the notations.

> The difference is subtle to non-native speakers of European languages. I don't think that's an accurate generalization. If anything, European languages are probably _more_ likely to morphologically distinguish nouns and verbs than normal, with English being an exception. (I don't have hard data to back this up though, could be wrong.)

I expect native speakers of English and other European languages to have less trouble than my girlfriend, who is not a native speaker of English or any other European language.

If (as you suppose) English and other European languages are likely to make large distinctions between nouns and verbs, then native speakers of those languages would more naturally notice the distinction in the sentence without having it pointed out to them, correct? I believe we're in agreement here.

Perhaps I went a bit too far in trying to reduce the wordiness of my statement and should have left it as "those who are not native speakers of English or any other Eurpean languages".

Re: X.Org Might Lose Its Domain Name

#76

Post by kijin »

0x0 wrote: post #44
monochromatic wrote: post #39

> The domain is currently registered in the name of X.Org Foundation LLC, which the foundation dissolved when forming the 501(c)3 organization. How is it even vaguely possible that there's no paperwork assigning all assets of X.Org Foundation LLC to the 501(c)(3)? Where is the lawyer who handled this for them?

There's something odd mentioned right here: http://www.x.org/wiki/BoardOfDirectors/ActionItems/ > We lost 501(c)(3) status because the tax returns for the last 3 years didn't get filed on time. This was a surprise(...) > Thanks to the SFLC we have re-gained our 501(c)(3) status.

Gaining or losing 501(c)(3) status does not affect the legal personhood of your organization.

Re: X.Org Might Lose Its Domain Name

#77

Post by kijin »

fencepost wrote: post #10
bosdev wrote: post #2

They're not losing it because of some legal battle or copyright claim, they're losing it because they lost contact with the guy who really owns it, and waited until they had one week to go to make the issue public.

No, they're in danger of massive registration headaches because they don't have a clear chain of proof of migration from the LLC (since dissolved) to the 501(c)3 that succeeded it, and they're either not in contact with the person who was the administrative contact when the LLC existed or he's being unhelpful. I'll note that the listing was last updated in 2007, so his name's been on the contact info for 8+ years - p…

In any case, they're in trouble because they forgot to renew the domain every year since 2007. If they had to do it every year instead of forgetting about it for almost a decade, they probably would have found out about the problem much sooner, and would have had several years to fix it.

If a domain is really important to me, I make sure to prepay for at least 3 years. I don't wait 3 years to renew it for another 3 years; I renew it every year to maintain the 3-year buffer. If I ever owned a single-letter domain, I would triple that buffer and top it up every year.

I just don't understand companies and organizations who keep their domains barely registered, always renewing at the last moment. A domain that expires in less than a year should be treated like a single point of failure for your entire business.

Re: X.Org Might Lose Its Domain Name

#78

Post by bjwbell »

GalacticDomin8r wrote: post #67
andrewd18 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As is standard for a Phoronix.com "article".

Ha, still not as bad as their "benchmarks" though.

What's bad about his benchmarks? I've cursory glanced at them before and didn't notice anything in particular (used to write gpu drivers for a living).

Re: X.Org Might Lose Its Domain Name

#79

Post by cachvico »

kijin wrote: post #76
0x0 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's something odd mentioned right here: http://www.x.org/wiki/BoardOfDirectors/ActionItems/ > We lost 501(c)(3) status because the tax returns for the last 3 years didn't get filed on time. This was a surprise(...) > Thanks to the SFLC we have re-gained our 501(c)(3) status.

Gaining or losing 501(c)(3) status does not affect the legal personhood of your organization.

...but it does say something about the organization of the organization.
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