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.
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.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-level_d...
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.