After Years of Serving X11, X.Org Stands To Lose Its One-Letter Domain (phoronix.com) 140
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.
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Maybe buying x11.org would be cheaper.
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What? x12.org is an established website. Why make up something like that?
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I already bought X12.org
see you there :)
Can I advertise my new soft drink, 8 Up, on your website?
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Wow this thread is humourless. Between this guy and the guy complaining about X12, we might as well just outlaw all comedians.
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XXX.orgy
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Hah.
I've already registered
XInfinityInfinitiesPlusOne.org
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Well, I ate at a Holiday Inn.
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illoyalty? Is that some new newspeak word that hasn't made circulation yet?
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I was about to ask what the difference between Illoyalty and Disloyalty is.
Do they have a word for someone who pretends to be loyal, and then later abandons their loyalty and does something horrible?
Oh wait.... that's Treason isn't it?
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this course of action is called illoyality, a very damning evidence of someone who should be shunned at all areas.
i am truley sorry for your lots
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If this "person" was involved with X.org, and then just decided to keep the domain to himself, this course of action is called illoyality, a very damning evidence of someone who should be shunned at all areas.
‘Illoyalty’ has been looked up 658 times on woktionary, is no one's favorite word yet, is on no lists yet, has no comments yet, and is not a valid Scrabble word.
Re: Good (Score:1)
Is sexconker having a bad fur day?
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Notice what the registrant email says in what you posted.
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I think the problem is that X.ORG Foundation, LLC no longer actually exists. They need a legal trail to show that the current foundation is the legal successor in interest, which they haven't got. Possibly they messed up the legals somewhere along the way so they are not in fact successor in interest and title to the domain was never transferred. In which case the domain is not, in fact, theirs.
It's not just open source projects (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:It's not just open source projects (Score:4, Interesting)
Another time we had this 18 y/o guy who made sites for people and the domains were registered to his account but not under his name - the fool threatened to take the site down and keep the domain if she wouldn't go out with him
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Used to work for a hosting company and seen it happen all the time. With actual malicious intent a lot of the time - two guys start a business and one of them runs away, has the domain in his name and starts sending mails to the guy still running the business saying "~haha~ you can't have the domain!!". Other times the guy running the business just has a falling out with his IT guy. Real childish carry on, you'd think these guys were old and wise enough not to carry on like this.
Another time we had this 18 y/o guy who made sites for people and the domains were registered to his account but not under his name - the fool threatened to take the site down and keep the domain if she wouldn't go out with him
You know what makes them grow up real fast? An injunction from a court of law.
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Is this the new troll line now? No more "you fail it" or "moo"? I've seen comments about "corporations are people" on a few recent articles, and it never quite seems to fit...
On another note, yes, this is part of why the notion of corporate personhood exists. Corporations are able to enter into contracts as legal entities separate from the individual people involved, so the individual's circumstances do not affect the contract's legality. That also means corporations need a measure of free expression, so th
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Arguably that same person should be responsible
Re:It's not just open source projects (Score:5, Insightful)
The challenge is that a number of companies don't have the notion of role based accounts, so when you are faced with registering something of the sorts, it is a challenge trying to work out the best way to do this, without tying the account to a transient entity (any employee or physical resource is transient).
Companies that don't have the notion of aliased accounts or special account types for this purpose are just asking for issues.
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And how exactly is a company supposed to make an aliased email account to register its domain, if it doesn't yet own its own domain?
A lot of us older IT folk were forced to register the company's domain in our name using our personal funds because our managers were clueless about the Internet at the time. It was either spend (waste) dozens of hours over several weeks or months t
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Well, the answer is you list multiple contacts on the domain registration.
ONE of the contacts' e-mail address should be on a domain that is NOT the same as the domain being registered; However, the E-mail account should be documented, owned and controlled by the company.
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Even worse are vendors that forbid and actively try to prevent the use of generic accounts. bobsmith@ is quite a busy guy. He's the contact for like 6 companies.
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We tried to hire him, but had to settle for Pete Moss.
Re:It's not just open source projects (Score:4, Interesting)
get licenses tied to their individual accounts
This is a partly corporate accounting problem, every time I have been given permission to buy software on behalf of a company they have asked me to do it with my CC and put in an expense claim. It's always the responsibility of the project/department head to manage license compliance/renewals, sucks to be them if they don't keep the license/renewal details I give them. Keeping a domain name you registered in good faith on behalf of someone else is just being a dick.
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You have never worked for a small company have you?
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or a big one either apparently.
Last time I worked for a Fortune 500 company you could not get a PO for anything that cost less than a certain dollar amount (limit depended upon the type of purchase, i.e. software versus hardware, capital vs non-capital expense). Everything under the limit needed to be handled as a reimbursement.
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Did that in work to pay for a bit of software for the company website, since the vendor used paypal and the company credit account already had a paypal account associated with it - which was innaccessible for *reason that doesn't matter*.
Didn't realise the plugin would be tied to my personal email until after buying the bloody thing.
Re:It's not just open source projects (Score:5, Insightful)
If said person was a founding member with an actual stake in the company, I wouldn't be too hard on them. I was part of a start-up and in the beginning it's all about making a profit and taking whatever shortcuts you can. If you get caught up in doing things "proper" and planning for when you have hundreds or thousands of employees you're probably not going to get there. Early Microsoft was hardly perfect but Gates ran with it. Early Oracle was hardly perfect but Ellison ran with it. Early Facebook was hardly perfect but Zuckerberg ran with it. Worrying too much about growth pains means you lose sight of the growth being the hard part and the pains the easy part. If you're just "an employee" and do things with your personal accounts then yeah, you deserve what's coming to you.
Re:It's not just open source projects (Score:5, Interesting)
I guess. Lately I think the real difference between a seasoned engineer and a "senior" engineer is just taking that extra 10% of time to do things vaguely sensibly up front. There is no such thing as temporary. At the least, set things up so refactoring them later doesn't require a total redo.
This guy in particular was just in way over his head but one of those sorts who is paranoid about admitting that or asking for help. In fact he was hostile to help. Not really part of my original point but he'd do stuff like;
- ignored my advice to not tie production services into corporate domain (if you ever get sold/acquired etc, you understand)
- ignored my advice to not create a "split domain" with the corporate domain (eg the windows domain was companyname.com, the windows dns servers thought they were SOAs but that same domain had actual internet resolvers with different records)
- refused to entertain the notion that linux was production ready (this was in 2009) and forced solaris as a standard. On x86. As vmware VMs.
- refused to take any help or assistance in installing the base OS despite being a windows guy with zero unix knowledge. We ended up with stuff like DB servers that had 2x swap as ram.. and they had 128G ram..
- For some odd reason was very hostile to the notion of service/host monitoring.. like.. not just against nagios but _anything_
The list goes on and on.
He was just really promoted way above his experience level as happens in startups; they hired me probably 8 months after him, when production databases had been wiped and backups hadn't been successful for months (back to the no monitoring thing).
It took a bunch of years to fully undo all the crap he had put in place. I danced a jig when I closed the lights on the datacenter he had built (we migrated). Did I mention in that datacenter, he setup "redundant" switches and firewalls for the servers.. but had all the internet drops coming down into one single unmanaged 1G cheapie netgear entry level switch?
If he had allowed me to help I bet he'd still be working there. I have no problems mentoring people as long as they're not asshats. Last I heard he was in law school after a stint in real estate..
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You know, I want to say you're full of shit and making that whole thing up BUT, sadly, I've read Slashdot (and seen enough of your posts) to the point where that doesn't even really surprise me any more and I completely believe you. I am so glad that I owned the business and that we got started as early as we did but, more importantly, I'm so friggen happy that I sold and got out when I did.
This sort of stuff is just mind boggling. I don't even understand how that happens. The very first thing I did when I
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> How does that sort of shit even happen? Who the hell promoted this person? Why?
A lot of the problem is the business side almost always knows nothing about the tech side or (bigger problem) who to trust and who is full of it. They're generally the sorts who can barely keep their own workstation under control. So you run into a few problems.
1) There's a shortage of qualified tech people who have been around long enough to avoid some of the common problems
2) The people ultimately responsible for hiring an
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You missed a vital clue.
especially in companies that are just starting up cash flow is a big friggin deal.
The cheapest solution no matter how badly conceived is always the best solution as long as it is functional.
This is the difference between tech guys and business guys. business guys always think about the money and cash flow first. We have $X,XXX dollars we need something that can do HHHHH. to do HHHH properly will cost $XX,XXX. yea but we can't afford that so we have to make do with this.
remember ju
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It's a good point but following some sort of vaguely sensible process and best practices (as nebulous as that can be) doesn't cost any money. Like, it doesn't cost any money to create role based accounts for service/license management, bring up systems in a clean repeatable way, implement monitoring etc. Most of my career has been around open source software which is free licensing fee-wise. I think you need qualified engineers regardless if it's OSS or not so the argument of "we need vendor support!" never
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I'm imagining myself way over my head in a new job I wanted to keep, and being a bit less scrupulous. I can easily see myself doing things like that. Bringing competent people in would make it obvious I wasn't, and shouldn't be paid at that level. I'd be frantically learning, and I'd miss a lot of things (like exactly what redundant network connections mean).
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Hmm... I'd not thought of that. I dunno though... LOL You're kind of old and have a moral compass now. ;-) It'd probably have to be a job you /really/ wanted. I'm going to pretend you'd never do such a thing.
I guess I'm just not creative enough because, sadly, that never crossed my mind. Yet, I bet it'd work in a number of places. It's like the adage about the two guys out bear hunting. I don't have to outrun the angry bear, I only have to outrun you.
Then again, I did lay out a decent plan for how BBC would
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I'm pretty good at thinking of evil things, and I like putting myself into situations so I can understand what likely goes through evildoers' minds, but I'm not sure I could actually be evil in that way.
One of the things I like here is there's a lot of diversity in experience and thinking.
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The phrase "Zero unix knowledge" is the key one...
Most getting started with unix guides seem to recommend swap as 2x ram, and these generally date from the days when you might have 16mb of ram and be trying out linux for the first time on a spare machine.
For a large server 2x ram isn't always appropriate, and you should use your experience to decide the appropriate swap size given the specs and purpose of the host.
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You call him a "dummkopf", but I know several cases where some "dummkopf" was the reason why a domain existed at all and not just some third party lock-in URL, and despite several attempts to transfer the domains to a role account, the projects would have sooner let the domains expire than take responsibility of them. It's always a mixture of not caring about things that seem to take care of themselves (thanks to the "dummkopf" paying out of his own pocket) and organizational red tape which makes these thin
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when DNS was invented, I'm pretty sure the idea was that this sort of thing would be impossible, because very few people would ever try to register something a mere one level away from the TLD.
x.desktop-environments.linux.os.open-source.org is a bit harder to dispute
I feel like I'm missing something here... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I feel like I'm missing something here... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:I feel like I'm missing something here... (Score:5, Funny)
We'll find out in the next 11 days
You mean x11 days. Ba-da-bing!
Re: I feel like I'm missing something here... (Score:3)
Sounds like he's been out of the project for a while and no one, including the registar, has his current contact information. It's probably why they're publishing the story. They're hoping he'll see the story and contact them.
Re: I feel like I'm missing something here... (Score:1)
Re:I feel like I'm missing something here... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Here's the current locks:
Domain Status: clientDeleteProhibited https://www.icann.org/epp#clientDeleteProhibited
Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited https://www.icann.org/epp#clientTransferProhibited
Domain Status: clientUpdateProhibited https://www.icann.org/epp#clientUpdateProhibited
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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
Re:I feel like I'm missing something here... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:I feel like I'm missing something here... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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.
There is some truth to what you're saying, just like there is some truth about the other side as well.
Some people make it a point to get a domain name under their own personal name, and personal credit card, even when asked not to do so initially by the leaders of the project. After all, among developers (and outside of university students who can be broke), people in Technology can usually afford the domain name registration fees, so this action is really not about money. It's usually about control.
During
Re: I feel like I'm missing something here... (Score:1)
It's only possible for the current registrar to renew the domain over EPP. However, .org domains auto renew at the registry, so the registrar must send an explicit DomainDelete command within the renewal grace period (about 30 days after expiration). Most likely if the registrant fails to renew within that period, they will sell/auction the domain instead of deleting it.
Re:I feel like I'm missing something here... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
whois (Score:1)
The whois, though showing leon's email, looks to have the XOrg foundation as the registrant, tech, and admin name.
Surely that's enough for network solutions to say that it's clearly the intent that it's the XOrg foundation that owns it rather than the individual?
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Big deal (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, he's listed as a contact but it's registered to "X.ORG Foundation, LLC". They just need to contact networksolutions. tell them the sob story and jump through the hoops (they may need to show incorporation docs) to prove they are actually the X.ORG Foundation. I've successfully done this for a client in the past. Maybe times have changed since then.
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As explained in TFA, ""The domain is currently registered in the name of X.Org Foundation LLC, which the foundation dissolved when forming the 501(c)3 organization."
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It may seem counter intuitive but a dissolved organization still exists, at some level, so that it can take care of business such as this.
Re:Big deal (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Whatever the name of the 501(c)3 is, is not the successor in interest to X.Org Foundation LLC. This is a trivially simple matter to resolve that exists all over corporate law.
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They just need to contact networksolutions
ahhahahahahahahhhhaaaaahahaaaaaaahahaha
Not always incompetent or malicious (Score:5, Informative)
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".
Is xxx.org still available? (Score:2)
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Using that instead would certainly boost the number of visitors by a magnitude... ;-)
Or, more appropriately: xxxxxxxxxxx.org
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Well, the IRS says the EIN was revoked (for non-filing of the 990) on May 15 2012. The Letter of Determination on X.org's site shows standing on May 17 2012 (and still current [irs.gov]).)
Guidestar is often slow at finding 990s. If The Foundation filed its first return as the new 170(b)(1)(A)(vi) in Feb 2014 (extensions after first FY?) it may still be working its way through the system.
Still, the revocation is unusual, and cause for a second look.
Who cares? (Score:1)
1998 wants its' concern over "cool" TLDs back.
Sure, it's an organization pain for a minor number of services, but it's hardly a travesty that warrants any coverage.
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Yawn should take all of faxing in on company letterhead to change to email.
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One letter domain names (Score:3)
I don't get it. (Score:1)
According to the article the x.org domain was registered to X.Org Foundation LLC, which got dissolved when the 501(c)3 organization was created.
But some organisation (presumably the 501(c)3 organization) must be the legal successor to the Foundation LLC. If they are not able to get the registration renewed just because the PERSON who wound up in the administrative/registration contacts doesn't approve it, then any employee that is in that contacts for any company could hold the companies domain registrat