I didn't see he forgot to return the keys (owned by the company). He asked for help to transition it off. No one came, so he just shut it down.
Yes. I can see how everyone's life is a bit harder since he has stopped providing free product and service for them. Well, they had a free ride to begin with.
I believe it is you missing the point. They're his keys. If I quit the company I'm working for, they can't just take all all my keys because at some point they gave me some.
This is no different than my old neighbor, Mr. Taylor. He used to let us use the pool in his backyard until one of the kids pooped in it. He stopped letting those kids come to the pool.
It's his pool, and it's his choice who can and can't use it. In this case, David Pollack has just decided nobody can use the pool, and he's put a fence around it.
You're just pissed you can't use the pool for free anymore.
I just think that his behavior is intended to maximize the potential damage to everyone, he is well aware of that and does it on purpose, because someone hurt his feelings.
In my opinion there are other, more constructive options available.
Can you prove that? I'm not familiar with the Scala drama.
Even if that innuendo is true, why don't you blame the one who hurts his feeling? Instead of blaming him. Open source developers are human, too. They have taken on far too much abuses from ungrateful users.
I don't see the need for David to be a doormat to every abusive user out there. I would snap too and say fuck it, you guys are on your own.
After people finally figured out that he was leaving (almost no one knew of that) they offered to take over the complete responsibility, what happens? Suddenly he wants to keep the domain, forcing everyone to pull and update their documentation, packages, artifact IDs, Maven POMs out there, because they can't use it anymore.
And the promised transition of accounts to another provider just won't work for all people who entered an id of "org.scala-tools", because most other providers require that the person publishing an artifact also controls the domain name.
The whole thing is basically maximized for pain and wasted hours of transitioning, migrating and repacking.
Have a look at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3495303 for the circumstances how he "told" everyone he was leaving. I visited the Lift IRC channel an hour ago and asked what their stance was on Pollak leaving Lift/Scala. They had no idea and asked for a link. So much for "nobody stepped up for maintenance". Of course nobody can step up if nobody knows.
It is not acceptable that someone who expected that he would transfer the domain to the people maintaining it insulted him, but how can this be communicated to that individual if no body knows who it was. "Somebody insulted me" doesn't help to resolve that matter.
The "keys" in this case are his own property, and any banners he might want to put up are being put up on his own property, so your supposed point makes no sense.
So you would expect to be totally within your rights if you would register windows-tools.com/net, ipod-library.com/net and use these sites to damage the reputation of the mentioned product?
You seem to be stuck on the idea that there's some sort of legally-enforceable trademark at issue, but you've provided no evidence of it. To even begin to claim a trademark, you must assert it, and I see no evidence of anyone asserting such a trademark. To actually enforce it in court, registration is required in the US and I'm sure at least some other countries.
You also have interpreted his statements as saying he will seek to harm the reputation of Scala, but his statements only imply that if you assume the worst about people. In other words, you're projecting.
Apart from that, registering multiple common scala-* domains and then making them point to his blog instead of something actually related to the topic is pretty much the definition of domain grabbing.
Sure, he can do it and figure out if he gets away with it. But in my opinion it is just ethically and morally wrong to register domains which with popular names which are expected to be used by Scala-related projects and keep them to punish the whole community for something a single person did.
You realise you're sounding a lot like you've never had to deal with the problems of the effectively single dns namespace before?
Trademarks don't automatically apply to domain names - since ordinary trademarks apply to a narrow protection of people offering "that same type of goods or services". ("Generic" trademarks exists, but need t meet much wider standards of public recognition than Scala-as-a-programming-language has.)
Apart from trademark disputes, which "The Scala Community" have no chance of winning here, domain names have _always_ been first come first served. If _you_ thought scala-tools.org was a worthwhile asset, you should have registered it before he did. Same with any scala-* domain.
Feel free to get huffy about whether or not you think he should have done things differently, but trying to frame this as some sort of abuse of domain name ownership is, frankly, naive...
I have no idea what your problem is, but feel free to completely ignore what I have written and write down your ramblings instead. The net is big enough for everybody, right?
Yes. I can see how everyone's life is a bit harder since he has stopped providing free product and service for them. Well, they had a free ride to begin with.