X.Org Might Lose Its Domain Name
phoronix.com
phoronix.com
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-level_dom...
Yes, single-letter domains are grandfathered but I wouldnt be aware of any special mandatory procedures for them as you mentioned. Please do provide a source otherwise.
There are provisions in place for replacing contacts on registered domains when the contact is someone no longer with an organization, and I'm pretty sure those aren't generally all that onerous (since incorrect changes can be reverted) - generally something on organization letterhead, probably a drivers' license photo, that kind of thing. In this case because the originally registering organization no longer exists they basically need proof that either the current foundation is legally the successor entity or they need proof that the domain name was part of the "assets" transferred to the new 501(c)3. They could probably have just sent in a change request on the current letterhead, but I suspect that A) they're no longer at that address either, B) Someone at Verisign said "Hey.... If we force an expiration we can auction this sucker for $$$$$$", or C) Leon Shiman could be expected to object to a change.
Another problem is the question of whether there's a registered trademark for X.Org - if they had that, even if someone else snagged the domain I suspect they'd be able to get it back via UDRP. Unfortunately it's not clear from a quick search that it's ever been trademarked, which likely drastically complicates the situation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-level_d...
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.)
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".
Basically, there's little reason to expect a Czech speaker to find this any easier than a Japanese speaker.
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.
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.
It sounded like it was registered to their LLC which was restructured, and now cannot prove they are still the same organization.
Basically, if someone snaps up the x.org domain, and can make a case that they have any legitimate purpose for it other than impersonating or extorting money from the X.org organization, they get to keep it.
"Since domains can be renewed from any handle, sometimes people create a new handle to renew a domain. (While this is not a problem in itself, it can create confusion, so it is only recommended as a last resort.)"
Basically you don't need access to the domain to renew it, you only need access if you want make changes. A random member of the public can renew a domain for you without contacting you.
Does it not work that way with Network Solutions? Can someone not just simply renew it for them?
That said, I can see why some owners may wish to immediately disavow a domain if they consider it to be a legal or reputational risk. In that case, it can simply be transferred to another owner, so I don't see why it would be a problem for anyone to renew it (though payment fraud might be a separate concern from some registrars).
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!
The given email address seems to belong to this person, but he is still not the actual owner/registrant of the domain, which is the LLC.
The question now is who is the actual representative, respectively legal successor, of the LLC. This person/entity should be able to get the contact address changed to an address under their control.
https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/help/dndr/udrp-en
edit: according to a verisign employee I know, it costs ~1000-2000USD to do the dispute process but if they have the trademark and it's not being challenged (go to trial) it just gets reviewed at meeting and people vote.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-level_dom...
all conjecture contained herein was for naught.
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?
> 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.
Since X is now deprecated tech (the foundation itself even states that Wayland is the future), a name change is perhaps in order.