[LA.pm] Need some advice

[Carl Groner]

On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 1:05 PM, Alex Teslik <alex at acatysmoof.com> wrote:
> Hi LA.pm,
>
>   I am the lead developer of OpenWebMail (http://openwebmail.acatysmoof.com)
> and I need some advice. Our old homepage at openwebmail.org has been taken
> hostage by the guy who registered it. He is now link-farming the site and
> making quite a bit of money from the pagerank everyone's work has given his
> domain (over $2400 this month so far). He will not grant us any access to
> change the site and refuses to stop link-farming it.
>
>   I've wanted to bring it up at several of the last meetings, but I've missed
> them due to a new baby at home. I'd really appreciate your input as I'm not
> sure what to do. We've got a release coming up after two years of hard work
> and I'd really prefer not to fork the project. I've tried contacting google to
> make them aware of his abuse of the pagerank that was built up by open source
> contributors, to no avail.
>
>   Is anyone aware of an open source project's homepage being hijacked like
> this in the past? How did they handle it?
>
> Thanks,
> Alex
>
> P.S.- You can see how much money he's made here:
> http://www.openwebmail.org/donation
> "support payments" he says :(

You may want to consider contacting the Software Freedom Law Center for advice:
http://www.softwarefreedom.org/

I personally have no experience working with them, but according to
their website they provide "direct services to nonprofit FLOSS
developers without charge".

I'm not a lawyer and wont pretend to know anything about how these
things are handled, but I'd imagine it'd be a simple case given the
following statement quoted from the projects  BSD license:

#      * Neither the name of The OpenWebMail Project nor the
#        names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products
#        derived from this software without specific prior written permission.


Good luck!

Carl.