Hijacking Trust? Bitvise Under Fire for Controlling Domain of FOSS Project PuTTY
1–10 of 79 posts
Re: Hijacking Trust? Bitvise Under Fire for Controlling Domain of FOSS Project PuTTY
#2Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44558328 "putty.org is not run by PuTTY developers"
Re: Hijacking Trust? Bitvise Under Fire for Controlling Domain of FOSS Project PuTTY
#3Here they think that what is doing Bitvise is legal but I think that it might not be the case in the law of a number of countries and even possibly in domain names "regulation"?
This is parasitism, or deceptive practice to hold the domain name of a competitor claiming your are to be associated with the other project.
Re: Hijacking Trust? Bitvise Under Fire for Controlling Domain of FOSS Project PuTTY
#4Under fire from who? That "journalist"?
It's best to just ignore them instead of trying to play their games.
Re: Hijacking Trust? Bitvise Under Fire for Controlling Domain of FOSS Project PuTTY
#5Here they think that what is doing Bitvise is legal but I think that it might not be the case in the law of a number of countries and even possibly in domain names "regulation"? This is parasitism, or deceptive practice to hold the domain name of a competitor claiming your are to be associated with the other project.
Certainly it's one basis for dispute (but only if it is trademarked): https://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/
Re: Hijacking Trust? Bitvise Under Fire for Controlling Domain of FOSS Project PuTTY
#6Here they think that what is doing Bitvise is legal but I think that it might not be the case in the law of a number of countries and even possibly in domain names "regulation"? This is parasitism, or deceptive practice to hold the domain name of a competitor claiming your are to be associated with the other project.
extremely subjective. the damage of allowing schoolmarm types to determine laws based on what they think is parasitic or deceptive is more dangerous than the unambiguous and coherent concept of property. PuTTY owns https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/
There are a number of strings in this domain that cause me great distress. Should I be allowed to seize their property?
Re: Hijacking Trust? Bitvise Under Fire for Controlling Domain of FOSS Project PuTTY
#7[flagged]
Re: Hijacking Trust? Bitvise Under Fire for Controlling Domain of FOSS Project PuTTY
#8[flagged]
Yes, but an outdated and broken version usually. You'd have to install mingw or cygwin for a proper one, or use a Linux VM like w4lv2.
Re: Hijacking Trust? Bitvise Under Fire for Controlling Domain of FOSS Project PuTTY
#9> “The difference is not one of profit, it is one of philosophy. You believe software can be managed by a committee. I believe software requires an owner, otherwise it is dead.”
This justification is even worse than the domain squatting itself.
Some of the most influential software in history (Linux, Git, GCC, and yes, PuTTY) thrived under community-driven development. The idea that software "dies" without a single corporate owner is not just false, it’s insulting to the open-source ecosystem.
If Bitvise truly believes in their philosophy, they wouldn’t need to borrow PuTTY’s reputation by holding putty.org. Maybe they should spend less time on branding and more time studying how successful open-source projects actually work.
Re: Hijacking Trust? Bitvise Under Fire for Controlling Domain of FOSS Project PuTTY
#10[flagged]
Putty isn't just ssh, it's also the VTE and serial terminal. Also it has its own keys/configs/shortcuts people are almost certainly used to. I don't think there's even an easy way to migrate putty shortcuts (I can't remember what they're called) to OpenSSH.