darwinports.com [was: Developer requesting deletion of port]

[Salvatore Domenick Desiano]

o A developer is requesting we delete a port of his.  I know MarKus has 
o not been active for awhile.

Seems reasonable to me.

Is there really nothing we can do about the *.darwinports.com sites? We, 
as a community, have decided it is a problem. The owner, from the 
e-mails, claims to want to support (or even be a member of) that 
community, but acts in contradiction to that claim. The site routinely 
causes confusion. I've looked through our archives, and the issue seems 
to have dead-ended at opendarwin trying to buy the site from its owner.

The site clearly makes money for its owner and makes it more difficult 
for people to find our site. Question:

1) We do not have a standard BSD or GPL license. How hard would it be 
  for us to add a term to base/LICENSE that requires any sites 
  attempting to reproduce or mirror information from our site or 
  repository to place a banner a the top of each page indicating that it 
  is duplicating information from our site.

2) In spite of our open source license, I believe that those sites are 
   actually tortuous interference (if not fraud) and open us to legal 
   remedy. If we have any lawyers on this list (which seems unlikely) or 
   on -users (which seems more likely), we could ask for a letter to be 
   drawn up. The ad revenue alone makes this a legal issue.

3) The site contains links to "Powered By DarwinPorts" that point to 
   that site, not ours, which is, at best, misdirection.

4) Since Darwinports.com is using Google AdSense, Google may be 
   particularly sensitive to its fraudulent nature of the site, since 
   having an misleadingly increased page rank that drives revenue to 
   Google could be percieved as Google biasing its listings to improve 
   its own revenue (a claim which it vehemently denies). We could write 
   a letter to Google and ask for their advice on the matter as a 
   starting point.


It annoys me, of course, that we work for free and that this site makes 
money off of it while causing us more work. Since I'm not coding much
on MP these days (though I should really get my bit set so I can commit
all these ports I keep writing for myself), I wouldn't mind doing some 
legwork for this.

I think I'm in a bad mood this morning.

-- Sal

P.S. I assume that the site owner is on this list, so please bear in 
     mind that all exchanges on this topic to date have been courteous.

smile.




--------------
  Salvatore Domenick Desiano
    Doctoral Candidate
      Robotics Institute
        Carnegie Mellon University

On Sun, 14 Jan 2007, Mark Duling wrote:

o 
o http://trac.macosforge.org/projects/macports/ticket/11072
o 
o The request seems reasonable.  Any objections to deleting the port?
o 
o Mark
o 
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o