I don't think Bitvise is even doing anything wrong here? There's nothing wrong with running what is essentially a fan site and promoting your own things on it.
It's a company who bought the domain of the exact name of the largest open source project that they directly compete with and then advertise themselves on it? This is at the very least unethical. You can't just use a competitors exact name to run a website that tries to snipe users looking for your competitor and call it a "fan site".
The comments on this submission are pretty strange. What are the chances that a bunch of non-sockpuppet HN type of people are in support of this kind of garbage? Generally with sort of abysmal behaviour like the email communication in the article, there's people going to bat against actually defensible actions purely in the name of civility on HN. These bitvise people seem bad from both angles and yet the of early comments are either ignoring the issue and redirecting (e.g. "who even uses putty") or outright defending their shitty behaviour?
It's definitely unethical but the creator of Putty keeps insisting and repeating that the Putty website is the long old homepage style URL and "always has been" and "if people search they can find it".
I think if they actually have a problem with it and are not just repeating that to cope they need to start acting like they have a problem with it. Trademarks need defending and you come out the door with the mental model that it's yours, you own it, the other group are in the wrong. If you opened your trademark dispute with "Well our trademark has always been X and people know to find us at X" you're gonna lose your dispute.
It's just hard to argue it's actually a real problem if the individual it's affecting keeps sort of pretending and saying that it's not even if deep down it is.
You can buy domain names with competitors names in them. People do this all the time. If you don't want people doing that you need to register the names yourself.
No, no you can't. I don't know where this misconception comes from.
Trademarks are trademarks, regardless of technology. I can't open a store called McDonald's that isn't a McDonald's but I sell cheeseburgers. Simply... moving this online doesn't magically make laws disappear.
Tech people have a strange misconception that tech overrides laws. No, it doesn't. Calling it "disruption" doesn't count, either.
If bought googlesearch.org but it's my own search engine that's illegal. You can't do that. Even if I did g00glesearch.org that's still illegal.
Even if I don't use the Google name, but I use something similar, maybe with a similar font, that's still illegal. Because, obviously, the intent is to deceive consumers. You can't do that. You can't pretend to be a brand you're not.
So someone who has written something and made it available for the common good, and makes no money from it, should now go and buy every possible domain that people might use in a deceptive manner.
This is a great example of what drives people away from providing anything for free.
Yes, all the ones actually worth owning are only a few dollars if you have a unique project name, you don't need "every possible domain" you just need one that looks legit.
Unfortunately this is the world we live in where if you don't then someone else will and they'll abuse it so you have to act defensively.
Either you put the time into the project and care about it in which case you should spend the few dollars a year defending it from drama like this, or you don't care even a few dollars worth about the project in which case just let whatever happens happen because you don't care, a .org is the price of a few coffees.
Only a few parts of the world you can leave a bike unlocked on the street, and the internet contains the whole world.
i could not tell which one of these should be more legitimate than any other. registering even just a few of those is going to add up to a sizable yearly bill.
It's a namespace problem. You can't just ban people from registering anything that might be confusing like that. If we followed your idea the internet wouldn't work.
EDIT: They're not deceiving users though? The first section on the index page links directly to the real putty site. They're very clear about all of it.
EDIT2: Nope. We really don't want DNS "moderators." All of us have seen what happens with forum moderators. Like I said if that were done the internet would not work. It's not about the cost it's about being unable to clearly define what should be banned.
If you want to see a great example
of how moderation like that both stops legitimate use and fails to stop malware go look at smartphone app stores. The result is borderline unusable garbage.
Selling mushy stuff for plumbers and kids? No problem!
It takes a simple reporting system, couple moderators costing peanuts compared to what we pay for the names and a clear set of rules forbidding intentionally misleading users.
