[lmm]

>"Scala" is also the name of a typeface, the student chapter of the American Library Association, part of human anatomy, a unit of area, a couple of music albums, a software company with no connection to the programming language, a couple of entertainment venues, two locations, a surname for I-don't-know how many people, and a snail.

disingenous. He's not talking about repurposing the domain for any of those things.

>A "community" cannot actually own a thing. Who exactly do you think should have the domain? Who represents "the community"?

Once the community gets sufficiently large, a formal foundation like apache or the python software foundation. (Obviously for practicality it's fine for the domains of a smaller community to be owned by individuals, but they should act as custodians)

>And why exactly does this amorphous "community" have some special claim to one of an infinite number of domains that might be used for similar or entirely different purposes?

If you call your domain scala-tools and your site becomes known as a place to get scala tools you have a moral obligation to keep it about scala tools, or give it up and let someone else use the name. Doing otherwise would be cybersquatting - scala-lang may not be a single person's name, but it still means something.