They're not losing it because of some legal battle or copyright claim, they're losing it because they lost contact with the guy who really owns it, and waited until they had one week to go to make the issue public.
No, they're in danger of massive registration headaches because they don't have a clear chain of proof of migration from the LLC (since dissolved) to the 501(c)3 that succeeded it, and they're either not in contact with the person who was the administrative contact when the LLC existed or he's being unhelpful. I'll note that the listing was last updated in 2007, so his name's been on the contact info for 8+ years - probably at that time they renewed for as long as the system would allow.
There are provisions in place for replacing contacts on registered domains when the contact is someone no longer with an organization, and I'm pretty sure those aren't generally all that onerous (since incorrect changes can be reverted) - generally something on organization letterhead, probably a drivers' license photo, that kind of thing. In this case because the originally registering organization no longer exists they basically need proof that either the current foundation is legally the successor entity or they need proof that the domain name was part of the "assets" transferred to the new 501(c)3. They could probably have just sent in a change request on the current letterhead, but I suspect that A) they're no longer at that address either, B) Someone at Verisign said "Hey.... If we force an expiration we can auction this sucker for $$$$$$", or C) Leon Shiman could be expected to object to a change.
Another problem is the question of whether there's a registered trademark for X.Org - if they had that, even if someone else snagged the domain I suspect they'd be able to get it back via UDRP. Unfortunately it's not clear from a quick search that it's ever been trademarked, which likely drastically complicates the situation.
They don't need to trademark (verb) X to get a trademark (noun). Registration is a good idea, but failure to register doesn't mean any joe can start using X.org. So long as the organization used the mark in trade (ie sold something and/or took donations) their basic trademark will be protected.
The difference is subtle to non-native speakers of European languages. Experience suggests that my girlfriend, for one, would find the gp easier to read with the notations.
> The difference is subtle to non-native speakers of European languages.
I don't think that's an accurate generalization. If anything, European languages are probably _more_ likely to morphologically distinguish nouns and verbs than normal, with English being an exception. (I don't have hard data to back this up though, could be wrong.)
I expect native speakers of English and other European languages to have less trouble than my girlfriend, who is not a native speaker of English or any other European language.
If (as you suppose) English and other European languages are likely to make large distinctions between nouns and verbs, then native speakers of those languages would more naturally notice the distinction in the sentence without having it pointed out to them, correct? I believe we're in agreement here.
Perhaps I went a bit too far in trying to reduce the wordiness of my statement and should have left it as "those who are not native speakers of English or any other Eurpean languages".
Okay, but then I presume you're implying that you're a native speaker of a European language and my statement doesn't apply to you.
I expect people who are not native speakers of English or other European languages to be helped by the annotation. My girlfriend and many of my colleagues here in Asia speak natively only East Asian languages. Some of my colleagues are native speakers of both English and one or more East Asian languages, and I don't expect that they would find the grammatical notation to be helpful to them. I also don't expect my colleague who's a native speaker of French and Chinese to be helped by the annotation, even though his English is obviously a second language. But, that's just my intuition based on living and working in East Asia.
In any case, they're in trouble because they forgot to renew the domain every year since 2007. If they had to do it every year instead of forgetting about it for almost a decade, they probably would have found out about the problem much sooner, and would have had several years to fix it.
If a domain is really important to me, I make sure to prepay for at least 3 years. I don't wait 3 years to renew it for another 3 years; I renew it every year to maintain the 3-year buffer. If I ever owned a single-letter domain, I would triple that buffer and top it up every year.
I just don't understand companies and organizations who keep their domains barely registered, always renewing at the last moment. A domain that expires in less than a year should be treated like a single point of failure for your entire business.
It's not quite that simple. Owning a trademark doesn't automatically give you the right to seize the corresponding domain names. ICANN has a dispute resolution policy that sets out rules for how such situations are handled: https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/policy-2012-02-25-en
Basically, if someone snaps up the x.org domain, and can make a case that they have any legitimate purpose for it other than impersonating or extorting money from the X.org organization, they get to keep it.
There are provisions in place for replacing contacts on registered domains when the contact is someone no longer with an organization, and I'm pretty sure those aren't generally all that onerous (since incorrect changes can be reverted) - generally something on organization letterhead, probably a drivers' license photo, that kind of thing. In this case because the originally registering organization no longer exists they basically need proof that either the current foundation is legally the successor entity or they need proof that the domain name was part of the "assets" transferred to the new 501(c)3. They could probably have just sent in a change request on the current letterhead, but I suspect that A) they're no longer at that address either, B) Someone at Verisign said "Hey.... If we force an expiration we can auction this sucker for $$$$$$", or C) Leon Shiman could be expected to object to a change.
Another problem is the question of whether there's a registered trademark for X.Org - if they had that, even if someone else snagged the domain I suspect they'd be able to get it back via UDRP. Unfortunately it's not clear from a quick search that it's ever been trademarked, which likely drastically complicates the situation.