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lefty
11-14-2012, 03:52 PM
CyanogenMod member goes rogue, demands $10K for domain
Nov. 14, 2012 (3:13 pm) By: Russell Holly

CyanogenMod

Open source projects are strange creatures. When it’s just one person, it’s not a major issue if the project lives or dies but when you have a large open source project, teamwork is everything. They live and die by the cooperation of the entire group. The CyanogenMod project is comprised entirely of members who contribute in their spare time. It is their passion, but often times it can be incredibly demanding in order to keep up with the breakneck speed of the Android release cycle. For reasons still not entirely clear, one member of the CyanogenMod team has taken the project’s domain hostage, as well as being responsible for several under-the-table payment deals that wound up going straight into someone’s pocket instead of supporting the project.

As it stands right now, the CyanogenMod team has effectively halted progress on their project to deal with this internal matter. The CM team warns that any @cyanogenmod.com email address is no longer valid since the rogue member controls the Google Apps account, and all of the content from the CM website has been ported to Cyanogenmod.org until the team can get the domain back. ICANN has been contacted regarding this matter, but since the rogue member has had no problems posing as Steve Kondik in the past, the process is rather complicated.

Until the team is able to regain complete control of the project, the CyanogenMod team is advising to simply ignore anything that comes from their lost .com.

The CyanogenMod ROM has been referred to on several occasions as a fork of Android, much in the same way SenseUI and TouchWiz are. It’s easy to look at the project and see a group of people trying to have some fun with an open source project, but now it is important that the team be seen as members of a legal entity that must now engage in what will more than likely be legal action to regain control of their domain name.

http://www.geek.com/articles/mobile/cyanogenmod-member-goes-rogue-demands-10k-for-domain-20121114/

leemajors
11-14-2012, 03:57 PM
sucks, but :lmao

lefty
11-14-2012, 10:37 PM
But, a little over a week ago, things took a bad turn. The person owning the CyanogenMod.com domain was caught impersonating Steve to make referral deals with community sites. When confronted and asked to hand over control of the domain amicably, he decided he wanted 10K USD for it, which we won’t (and can’t) pay.

We contacted those he had established deals with, only to discover that the person tasked with maintaining our web presence was setting up deals under the CM name, and impersonating Cyanogen himself. Plenty of satisfying evidence was provided by those sites / entities to make us certain that this wasn’t a misunderstanding or one-time thing. Quote:
We have changed ownership of the social media accounts. When asked again to make the transition nicely, he responded with the following

“Hi, so you think by removing all my access across the infrastructure was going to be a great idea? We had a chat yesterday, you’ve decided to end this bitter. How about I just change the DNS entries right now. CM will practically go down.”

Refusing to be extorted for funds, and then being threatened is “ending it bitter”? Today, it happened: all of our records were deleted, and cyanogenmod.com is slowly expiring out of the Internet and being replaced by blank pages and non-existing sites. @cyanogenmod.com e-mail is now being directed to a mailserver completely out of our control, too.