Maintainers of MacPorts, There is a fairly benign, but terribly frustrating issue with which you should deal swiftly. Somebody by the name of Mat Caughron is running a mirror of the MacPorts project at http://darwinports.com/ Unfortunately, such a usually kind favor is actually a mischievous attempt to garner advertisement revenue and glean user email addresses. While these ulterior motives are trashy, what disturbs me most is the confusion that results from 2 seemingly viable ports systems, especially since Mat Caughron not only hosts the system under the name DarwinPorts, but he also tries to hide the direct connection with MacPorts. Which one is the "correct" system? This semblance of disorganization and trashiness drives people away from open source or at least to other projects like fink. It is a branding issue. I advise the following: (1) Clarify the situation in the FAQ, in the Wiki, and on the main page. It should be stated in rather clear terms that darwinports.com is attempting to rebrand MacPorts mischievously for email gathering and unwarranted advertisement revenue. A strong statement makes it clear which project is official. (2) Explicitly state somewhere that derivatives must acknowledge MacPorts clearly; this will help with future troubles. (3) Try to negotiate the transfer of the ownership of darwinports.com to the MacPorts team; he can app- arently be contacted at Mat Caughron (408) 910-1266 caughron@gmail.com In any case, this subject of darwinports.com came up once in discussions: http://osdir.com/ml/opendarwin.darwinports/2004-02/msg00090.html and though Mat Caughron pretended to be a novice, who was just having fun and trying to support a project, it came to light that he had tried and is still trying to peddle other projects: http://osdir.com/ml/opendarwin.darwinports/2004-02/msg00091.html Furthermore, James Berry contacted Mat Caughron a couple of years ago in order to resolve this point of contention by initiating a transfer of the domain ownership to the project. In return, Matt Caughron required a PowerBook. With (1), it won't really matter if this transaction is refused. Sincerely, Michael Witten
Well, we're aware that this problem exists. Partly as a result of this problem, since no agreement on the transfer of the domain name into our control could be reached, the name of the project was changed to MacPorts. The correct official web site for this project is http://www.macports.org/ . It was previously http:// www.darwinports.org/ . It has never been darwinports dot com. I don't know if anyone has attempted to contact the owner of darwinports dot com recently to negotiate a transfer. I'd be happy to do so on behalf of the project if desired, but we should coordinate this so that we don't all independently try to contact him. Someone from portmgr should chime in here and advise. On Jan 8, 2008, at 00:38, Michael Witten wrote:
Maintainers of MacPorts,
There is a fairly benign, but terribly frustrating issue with which you should deal swiftly.
Somebody by the name of Mat Caughron is running a mirror of the MacPorts project at
Unfortunately, such a usually kind favor is actually a mischievous attempt to garner advertisement revenue and glean user email addresses.
While these ulterior motives are trashy, what disturbs me most is the confusion that results from 2 seemingly viable ports systems, especially since Mat Caughron not only hosts the system under the name DarwinPorts, but he also tries to hide the direct connection with MacPorts.
Which one is the "correct" system?
This semblance of disorganization and trashiness drives people away from open source or at least to other projects like fink.
It is a branding issue.
I advise the following:
(1) Clarify the situation in the FAQ, in the Wiki, and on the main page.
It should be stated in rather clear terms that darwinports.com is attempting to rebrand MacPorts mischievously for email gathering and unwarranted advertisement revenue.
A strong statement makes it clear which project is official.
(2) Explicitly state somewhere that derivatives must acknowledge MacPorts clearly; this will help with future troubles.
(3) Try to negotiate the transfer of the ownership of darwinports.com to the MacPorts team; he can app- arently be contacted at
Mat Caughron (408) 910-1266 caughron@gmail.com
In any case, this subject of darwinports.com came up once in discussions:
http://osdir.com/ml/opendarwin.darwinports/2004-02/msg00090.html
and though Mat Caughron pretended to be a novice, who was just having fun and trying to support a project, it came to light that he had tried and is still trying to peddle other projects:
http://osdir.com/ml/opendarwin.darwinports/2004-02/msg00091.html
Furthermore, James Berry contacted Mat Caughron a couple of years ago in order to resolve this point of contention by initiating a transfer of the domain ownership to the project. In return, Matt Caughron required a PowerBook.
With (1), it won't really matter if this transaction is refused.
Sincerely, Michael Witten
Oh, and: darwinports dot com is not a mirror of the MacPorts project. Rather, it is merely a different front-end to view the available ports, and it also contains (probably incorrect) instructions for installing and using MacPorts. I'm changing the subject line to a non-link so that we don't drive even more traffic to this inconvenient web site. On Jan 8, 2008, at 00:55, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
Well, we're aware that this problem exists. Partly as a result of this problem, since no agreement on the transfer of the domain name into our control could be reached, the name of the project was changed to MacPorts. The correct official web site for this project is http://www.macports.org/ . It was previously http:// www.darwinports.org/ . It has never been darwinports dot com.
I don't know if anyone has attempted to contact the owner of darwinports dot com recently to negotiate a transfer. I'd be happy to do so on behalf of the project if desired, but we should coordinate this so that we don't all independently try to contact him. Someone from portmgr should chime in here and advise.
I think there's little point in pursuing this further. We went through the whole froo-frah about this back when MacPorts was called DarwinPorts and darwinports.com was first brought to the project's attention. At that time, we negotiated unsuccessfully for the domain transfer and ultimately chose to change the project name to MacPorts and extensively rebrand the project (after, of course, obtaining all the appropriate macports domains this time around). The matter should now rest since it's hard enough just enforcing your actual project name much less going after derivatives. What next? Someone could register any one of macosports.com, macosxports.com, macsoftwareports.com, etc etc (all of which are closer to macports and even more likely to cause confusion) and the project would quickly find itself spending more time chasing people with sticks than actually maintaining ports. The darwinports.com horse is already dead and buried, and the set of folks who still remember it as "darwinports" is a decreasing number of people, so at some point the problem will ultimately solve itself. - Jordan On Jan 7, 2008, at 10:55 PM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
Well, we're aware that this problem exists. Partly as a result of this problem, since no agreement on the transfer of the domain name into our control could be reached, the name of the project was changed to MacPorts. The correct official web site for this project is http://www.macports.org/ . It was previously http://www.darwinports.org/ . It has never been darwinports dot com.
I don't know if anyone has attempted to contact the owner of darwinports dot com recently to negotiate a transfer. I'd be happy to do so on behalf of the project if desired, but we should coordinate this so that we don't all independently try to contact him. Someone from portmgr should chime in here and advise.
On Jan 8, 2008, at 00:38, Michael Witten wrote:
Maintainers of MacPorts,
There is a fairly benign, but terribly frustrating issue with which you should deal swiftly.
Somebody by the name of Mat Caughron is running a mirror of the MacPorts project at
Unfortunately, such a usually kind favor is actually a mischievous attempt to garner advertisement revenue and glean user email addresses.
While these ulterior motives are trashy, what disturbs me most is the confusion that results from 2 seemingly viable ports systems, especially since Mat Caughron not only hosts the system under the name DarwinPorts, but he also tries to hide the direct connection with MacPorts.
Which one is the "correct" system?
This semblance of disorganization and trashiness drives people away from open source or at least to other projects like fink.
It is a branding issue.
I advise the following:
(1) Clarify the situation in the FAQ, in the Wiki, and on the main page.
It should be stated in rather clear terms that darwinports.com is attempting to rebrand MacPorts mischievously for email gathering and unwarranted advertisement revenue.
A strong statement makes it clear which project is official.
(2) Explicitly state somewhere that derivatives must acknowledge MacPorts clearly; this will help with future troubles.
(3) Try to negotiate the transfer of the ownership of darwinports.com to the MacPorts team; he can app- arently be contacted at
Mat Caughron (408) 910-1266 caughron@gmail.com
In any case, this subject of darwinports.com came up once in discussions:
http://osdir.com/ml/opendarwin.darwinports/2004-02/msg00090.html
and though Mat Caughron pretended to be a novice, who was just having fun and trying to support a project, it came to light that he had tried and is still trying to peddle other projects:
http://osdir.com/ml/opendarwin.darwinports/2004-02/msg00091.html
Furthermore, James Berry contacted Mat Caughron a couple of years ago in order to resolve this point of contention by initiating a transfer of the domain ownership to the project. In return, Matt Caughron required a PowerBook.
With (1), it won't really matter if this transaction is refused.
Sincerely, Michael Witten
macports-dev mailing list macports-dev@lists.macosforge.org http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macports-dev
Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:
The matter should now rest since it's hard enough just enforcing your actual project name much less going after derivatives. What next? Someone could register any one of macosports.com, macosxports.com, macsoftwareports.com, etc etc (all of which are closer to macports and even more likely to cause confusion) and the project would quickly find itself spending more time chasing people with sticks than actually maintaining ports. The darwinports.com horse is already dead and buried, and the set of folks who still remember it as "darwinports" is a decreasing number of people, so at some point the problem will ultimately solve itself.
The usual reason to why it reappears is because the port view at e.g. foo.darwinports.com usually comes up higher in search results from e.g. Google than what the corresponding page in http://db.macports.org or http://macports.org/ports.php does... And since it shows the same Portfile with the same version, people tend to get confused between darwinports and macports still. If the two (!) MacPorts lists could be consolidated (like the Guide has been), that would probably help clear things up ? --anders
On 8 Jan 2008, at 3:34 AM, Anders F Björklund wrote:
Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:
The matter should now rest since it's hard enough just enforcing your actual project name much less going after derivatives. What next? Someone could register any one of macosports.com, macosxports.com, macsoftwareports.com, etc etc (all of which are closer to macports and even more likely to cause confusion) and the project would quickly find itself spending more time chasing people with sticks than actually maintaining ports. The darwinports.com horse is already dead and buried, and the set of folks who still remember it as "darwinports" is a decreasing number of people, so at some point the problem will ultimately solve itself.
The usual reason to why it reappears is because the port view at e.g. foo.darwinports.com usually comes up higher in search results from e.g. Google than what the corresponding page in http://db.macports.org or http://macports.org/ports.php does...
And since it shows the same Portfile with the same version, people tend to get confused between darwinports and macports still. If the two (!) MacPorts lists could be consolidated (like the Guide has been), that would probably help clear things up ?
I still think my first suggestion is the best:
(1) Clarify the situation in the FAQ, in the Wiki, and on the main page.
It should be stated in rather clear terms that darwinports.com is attempting to rebrand MacPorts mischievously for email gathering and unwarranted advertisement revenue.
A strong statement makes it clear which project is official.
On Jan 8, 2008, at 12:48 AM, Michael Witten wrote:
I still think my first suggestion is the best:
(1) Clarify the situation in the FAQ, in the Wiki, and on the main page.
Well, the project documentation is no different than, say, a Portfile - by all means open a ticket and attach a diff with the wording you think would be appropriate (I believe the web site contents are in svn, yes?). That will expedite this change since all a committer needs to do is apply your patch and check it in. - Jordan
On Jan 8, 2008, at 2:25 AM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
Well, we're aware that this problem exists. Partly as a result of this problem, since no agreement on the transfer of the domain name into our control could be reached, the name of the project was changed to MacPorts. The correct official web site for this project is http://www.macports.org/ . It was previously http://www.darwinports.org/ . It has never been darwinports dot com.
I don't know if anyone has attempted to contact the owner of darwinports dot com recently to negotiate a transfer. I'd be happy to do so on behalf of the project if desired, but we should coordinate this so that we don't all independently try to contact him. Someone from portmgr should chime in here and advise.
As Jordan says, this is an already beaten to death horse. We tried a number of times, all to no avail, to negotiate the transfer of the domain to us back when we were called DarwinPorts, but now with our new project name that's a bit of a moot point. Negotiations for a cease and desist of this leeching activity were also fruitless, just as were invitations to Mr. Caughron to give a bit back to the project and invest some of those energies in improving our own web portal, since he obviously has a thing for web development. In conclusion, I'll state clearly with my PortMgr hat on that we hold NO TIES WHAT-SO-EVER to darwinports dot com and have NO INTEREST in establishing any at the time being. On the other hand, we do wish to work harder and harder to further consolidate our position as an Open Source software porting project for the Mac OS X platform, reason why some of us have been devoting a lot of energies lately to some of the project aspects that unfortunately were neglected for far too long: a real website with consolidated information and resulting improved search engine rankings, a revitalized and readily available project guide, a unified project name, etc, etc, etc... Any help in improving and extending in any way any of these efforts is more than gladly welcomed! For instance, anyone with obvious tips on how to improve our search engine rankings should not delay one bit in discussing them with me. As I said in a post a while ago (http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-dev/2007-December/003922.html ), our web presence has improved dramatically! But as was appropriately noted by Emmanuel (http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-dev/2007-December/003924.html ), there's still quite a bit of work to be done, as any search for MacPorts *and* a particular portname does give our dear leech a much higher ranking. As Jordan asked, our web sources are indeed in svn (/ trunk/www/), so anyone interested in giving us a hand there should dive right in! I have our www.macports.org URL registered with Google under my Gmail Id, so I have direct access to very interesting stats results that will definitely come in handy when improving our rank. To anyone reading, do contact me if you'd like to discuss this further. Another area of obvious improvement is finally bringing James' mpwa at http://db.macports.org into our consolidated web portal, by, among others, unifying its look and feel with our new one at www.macports.org and also finding smart ways to integrate its functionality with that at www.macports.org/ports.php. The sources for mpwa are at svn's /users/jberry/mpwa, so anyone interested in helping in that area can also jump right in (warning, mpwa is implemented in Ruby on Rails). I'm sure work on this area would greatly help balance what Emmanuel pointed out. Last but certainly not least, I'd like to state again that there are also other areas in which we could improve our presence while at the same time making it clear what our relation to darwinports dot com is (or lack of it, for that matter). Nevertheless, I wouldn't want to pollute things like our front page, guide and similar with notes about darwinports dot com, as that in itself would be, besides ugly, some form of advertisement for that site (there's already a very loud warning that springs up at www.macports.org if you're referred to us from darwinports dot com, cf. svn's /trunk/www/includes/warnings.inc). Other things like FAQ entries are gladly accepted, though (hint: as Jordan says, there's the "Website & Documentation" milestone up at our Roadmap -- http://trac.macports.org/projects/macports/roadmap -- to classify appropriate tickets which could hold suggested patches ;-). Regards,... -jmpp
On Jan 8, 2008, at 00:38, Michael Witten wrote:
Maintainers of MacPorts,
There is a fairly benign, but terribly frustrating issue with which you should deal swiftly.
Somebody by the name of Mat Caughron is running a mirror of the MacPorts project at
Unfortunately, such a usually kind favor is actually a mischievous attempt to garner advertisement revenue and glean user email addresses.
While these ulterior motives are trashy, what disturbs me most is the confusion that results from 2 seemingly viable ports systems, especially since Mat Caughron not only hosts the system under the name DarwinPorts, but he also tries to hide the direct connection with MacPorts.
Which one is the "correct" system?
This semblance of disorganization and trashiness drives people away from open source or at least to other projects like fink.
It is a branding issue.
I advise the following:
(1) Clarify the situation in the FAQ, in the Wiki, and on the main page.
It should be stated in rather clear terms that darwinports.com is attempting to rebrand MacPorts mischievously for email gathering and unwarranted advertisement revenue.
A strong statement makes it clear which project is official.
(2) Explicitly state somewhere that derivatives must acknowledge MacPorts clearly; this will help with future troubles.
(3) Try to negotiate the transfer of the ownership of darwinports.com to the MacPorts team; he can app- arently be contacted at
Mat Caughron (408) 910-1266 caughron@gmail.com
In any case, this subject of darwinports.com came up once in discussions:
http://osdir.com/ml/opendarwin.darwinports/2004-02/msg00090.html
and though Mat Caughron pretended to be a novice, who was just having fun and trying to support a project, it came to light that he had tried and is still trying to peddle other projects:
http://osdir.com/ml/opendarwin.darwinports/2004-02/msg00091.html
Furthermore, James Berry contacted Mat Caughron a couple of years ago in order to resolve this point of contention by initiating a transfer of the domain ownership to the project. In return, Matt Caughron required a PowerBook.
With (1), it won't really matter if this transaction is refused.
Sincerely, Michael Witten
macports-dev mailing list macports-dev@lists.macosforge.org http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macports-dev
participants (5)
-
Anders F Björklund
-
Jordan K. Hubbard
-
Juan Manuel Palacios
-
Michael Witten
-
Ryan Schmidt