The opendarwin .com debacle

[James Berry]

Well, Mat Caughron <mat at caughron.com>, or caughron at gmail.com, who is  
the guy who runs the darwinports [dot] com site in question, and who  
makes money by confusing our users and soliciting donations for the  
work of the macports proejct, none of which ever get to the project,  
is a apparently a consultant who professes to specialize in OS and web  
security.

Maybe we should just publicize all of the information about what a  
sleeze-ball he is about this, and see if it gets back to his clients?  
We could put a big banner on our page: "Mat Caughron is a sleezeball:  
read more". Maybe we can get some of the trade press to do an article  
on people who make money by unethically pretending to be open-source  
software projects?

James


On Oct 14, 2009, at 7:14 PM, Bryan Blackburn wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 03:55:14PM -0700, Scott Haneda said:
>> On Oct 14, 2009, at 1:16 PM, Jeremy Lavergne wrote:
> [...]
>>> I recall in the past when reading his emails with the portmgrs that
>>> he thought it was helpful to visitors.  We need to document that
>>> it's clearly not and inform him as such.  Legal action can already
>>> be taken since macports.org is copywriter with all rights reserved.
>>> He is likely stealing content from us.
>>
>> What is the last communication that was had with Matt, and what is
>> his position?  Is there any point in opening dialogue with him again?
>
> The last public communication, that I know of, is linked on our  
> DarwinPorts
> page:
>
> <http://trac.macports.org/wiki/DarwinPorts>
>
> [...]
>> What is it, it is not .net as far as I can tell, which seems to be
>> available.  I would like to purchase this domain now, and donate it
>> to macports, I can do the redirection or they can have the entire
>> domain. How do I proceed?
>
> I used to own darwinports dot net and just had it forward to the right
> place; I didn't renew it a couple years ago because of the move to  
> MacPorts
> in all things.  At this point, it's been MacPorts for over three  
> years now,
> so the real message these days is really, DarwinPorts is long dead.
>
>>
>> This is a concern, that site is beating the official source in  
>> ranking
>> http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=darwinports&aq=f&oq=&aqi=g10
>
> Yeah, I think that's mostly because of <portname>.domain being used.
>
> [...]
>>> It is a violation:  all rights for access to content on
>>> macports.org are RESERVED.  We can technically already slap him
>>> with a takedown notice.
>>
>> Can you find the ISP?  I do not think there would be a lot of luck
>> hitting up register.com, as domain take downs are a nasty road to go
>> down.
>
> Note that there really isn't any kind of actionable violation, as  
> MacPorts
> uses the BSD license, and the web page there looks to be his own  
> creation...
>
> Bryan
>
> [...]
>
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