Potential disruption to MacPorts domain registration

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Mar 29, 2012, at 22:24, Sam Kuper wrote:
> On 29 March 2012 20:11, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>> On Mar 29, 2012, at 14:04, Jan Stary wrote:
>>> What exactly is the
>>> relation of macports to Apple as a corporation?
>> 
>> http://trac.macports.org/wiki/MacPortsHistory
> 
> This is helpful but not very detailed. It doesn't clearly explain how
> much involvement, if any, Apple has had since this email was sent[1],
> in which is was written that, 'James Berry, a member of the
> DarwinPorts steering committee says: "We are pleased that by offering
> us hosting and administrative support services, Apple continues to
> demonstrate its strong commitment to the open source community. That
> support is vital to our project."
> 
> If Apple is still providing hosting and administrative support
> services, perhaps they could intervene
> (legally/financially/technologically) to ensure that there is no
> disruption to the Macports project because of gkg.net's shameful
> intransigence. If so, who would be the right person to contact at
> Apple, to bring this to Apple's attention? Is there still a
> DarwinPorts/MacPorts steering committee?

Apple still runs Mac OS Forge. Mac OS Forge still provides our hosting and infrastructure. People with apple.com email addresses still contribute to ports and base. MacPorts is an independent open-source project and is not under Apple's supervision or jurisdiction.

We have not attempted to contact Apple Legal and do not believe they would want to get involved in this matter.

We have funds available from prior years of Google Summers of Code.

The steering committee is now called the MacPorts management (or "portmgr"), and consists of jmr, raimue, and myself. The former management is called the elder council and consists of jberry, jmpp and mww.

Today James attempted to pay the required fees to restore our account with gkg to good standing. I have not heard whether he was successful in doing so.


> Does anyone here have time to look over
> http://www.icann.org/en/resources/registrars/registrant-rights-responsibilities
> and/or related documents for any applicable clauses that might
> disallow registrars from acting as gkg.net has done? Might be
> worthwhile.
> 
> Sam
> 
> [1] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.os.opendarwin.darwinports/18725