[LA.pm] Need some advice

[Alex Teslik]

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 :(