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Comment by bronson | Hacker News Reader

It seems a nice idea, buying the CM.com domain and donating it to the project. Wonder if this sleazeball had a change of heart, or was he planning on embezzling referral traffic the whole time?

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I read:

And due to the small size (and lack of funds), the CyanogenMod.com domain was bought by a third-party back in 2009 and donated to CM, when CM was a much smaller project and had no online presence besides XDA.

I must be missing something (and speaking from a US perspective), but was $10 really unattainable in order to secure a domain? Three years worth would have been $30-ish dollars now. Genuinely curious what led up to this scenario.

It probably wasn't, but it was probably someone he worked with/knew pretty well/whatever and he never thought much more of it or was pretty broke and someone else offered to help him out a little. One of life's lessons and next time he (and we) won't be making the same mistake.

It's a lame situation, for sure, over what appears to be a strictly greedy or personal matter. And hindsight is alwasy 20/20. Fortunately, a good name was available and (hopefully) only an inconvience in time and effort is the major consequence (well, and all those now non-resolving links).

Glad to read the story that all has been resolved now! :)

I might have missed something, but it's not clear to me whether the original gifter is the person who hijacked the domain.

That's true. I made the assumption it was the same person based on:

The person owning the CyanogenMod.com domain was caught impersonating Steve to make referral deals with community sites. When confronted and asked to hand over control of the domain amicably, he decided he wanted 10K USD for it, which we won’t (and can’t) pay.

but, that could be a mistake if "owning" meant he simply took control of it at some point over the years.

It's slightly contradictory, because it says the original person "gave" them the domain. I at first took that to mean in all senses. But it does seem likely that if there were two different unnamed people associated with the website they would have made that distinction clear.

(The confusion could have been avoided by assigning a nym to anyone who they didn't want to name explicitly.)

$10,000 dollars for a domain seems a bit much by itself. When you add the factor that you should have right to it and it was basically stolen.. there's no way they should pay that.

I absolutely agree, it's just unfortunate. The only domains worth that much are really rare.

Unless cyanogenmod.com had already been taken by a squatter, who was selling it for a few hundred dollars.

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