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Re: Themes, competitions, and Textgarden
I’m certain a community fund could be established to ensure project domain names were maintained. In that case, getting them out from under Jason and Dean makes sense. 2 cents.
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Re: Themes, competitions, and Textgarden
Destry wrote:
I’m certain a community fund could be established to ensure project domain names were maintained. In that case, getting them out from under Jason and Dean makes sense
True but I dunno if a domain can be owned by The Textpattern Community. I believe it still has to be a person, corporation, charity or some other entity.
Not sure if it has to be a legal entity, like “The Textpattern Foundation” or something nebulous like “Team Textpattern” (which may actually be copyrighted, I can’t remember). Bottom line I guess is that ICANN / Nominet want some flesh and blood to prod in case of a dispute. Damn lawyers. But IANL (thank goodness) so someone more clued up than me on this can no doubt shed some more light.
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Re: Themes, competitions, and Textgarden
Well I’m quite happy to go along with future plans and remain as steward of “Textpattern Themes” so yes, please keep me in the loop.
As for domains I believe that themes.textpattern.com, docs.textpattern.com and plugins.textpattern.com are sub-domain names. Correct me if I am wrong.
Why not just let me buy themes-textpattern.com, docs-textpattern.com and plugins-textpattern.com and consider them as a contribution to Textpattern from a very satisfied user of long-standing? All I would need would be some nameservers to point them at. That way they all have proper domains and remain connected to Textpattern. At some point in the future I could always have them transferred to a nominated party if desired. I should mention that I do get a good discount for this sort of thing. :)
Might want to think about “forum-textpattern.com” as well.
Last edited by thebombsite (2012-07-30 16:55:00)
Stuart
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Re: Themes, competitions, and Textgarden
Thanks for the offer, but if we can get textpattern.com transferred to Robert we can simply use subdomains (which dont cost anything extra) and save everyone some cash. Otherwise those domains are going to need regular renewals which might become expensive long-term.
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Re: Themes, competitions, and Textgarden
Fair enough. Dean still owns that one doesn’t he?
Stuart
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Re: Themes, competitions, and Textgarden
Bloke wrote:
Well, he’d have to pay for them all if that was the case :-P
This is feasible and a cheap medicine against the annual July 26th stress.
Bloke wrote:
I believe it still has to be a person, corporation, charity or some other entity.
True. I think that most of today’s open source projects are either one-man endeavours, or backed by a foundation (WikiMedia Foundation, Document Foundation, WordPress Foundation, Drupal Foundation, jQuery Foundation).
In Austria this is called a “Verein” and requires a bit of legal paperwork and a little bureaucratic overhead (not very much: every brass band, group of five pet activists, ninja chess fighters… has their own “Verein” here).
If we reach some sort of consenus among all participating parties I could talk to a lawyer to gather more details about cost and obligations. Let me know.
philwareham wrote:
if we can get textpattern.com transferred to Robert we can simply use subdomains
We can do that anyway. While we do not own the domain and therefore its name server entries we do control the name servers and the zone file.
Migrating the various sibling domains into subdomains of textpattern.com is not a technical issue but merely an organisational project.
thebombsite wrote:
Dean still owns that one doesn’t he?
Yes.
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Re: Themes, competitions, and Textgarden
@wet
So do you think can get Dean to transfer that domain to you? Stops the risk of textpattern.com not being renewed each year.
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Re: Themes, competitions, and Textgarden
thebombsite wrote:
Well I’m quite happy to go along with future plans and remain as steward of “Textpattern Themes” so yes, please keep me in the loop.
Okay, great! I’ll get you into planning soon.
philwareham wrote:
…if we can get textpattern.com transferred to Robert we can simply use subdomains (which dont cost anything extra) and save everyone some cash. Otherwise those domains are going to need regular renewals which might become expensive long-term.
This begins to sound like your going to ditch .net, .org, and textgarden and put the underlying projects into subdirectories of .com. While that’s one way to do it, I guess, that wasn’t what I thought was the plan. Rather there would be some aliasing done instead so that if someone went to textpattern.net, for example, they will really be there, but their URL would appear docs.textpattern.com. This is possible if all the domains are owned by agreeable parties and DNS are accessible. Others will certainly know the mechanics of it better than me.
Also, though it could have changed recently, serving content from an actual sub-domain used to impact the SEO of the content in the root domain. Maybe that’s not a big issue anymore.
Lastly, what happens to those dumped domains? They’re actually pretty valuable, and if in the wrong hands, they could turn into something that hurts the project, not helps it. Thus, if you keep them, then you might as well use them.
We’re talking about a community of people contributing to covering the cost of domain ownership for… what, five years at a time for five domains? That’s not very much if you spread it out over a 1000 people, for example. :)
The question really becomes: how are the domains managed as project leads come and go? I.e., if they go under wet’s name, which I don’t think he minds, what happens to them if/when wet leaves the project? They get passed to the new chief in command?
wet wrote:
I think that most of today’s open source projects are either one-man endeavours, or backed by a foundation
Ah… foundation … now that’s interesting (wouldn’t you agree, Les?). That might be something to talk about more, actually.
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Re: Themes, competitions, and Textgarden
Destry wrote:
We’re talking about a community of people contributing to covering the cost of domain ownership for… what, five years at a time for five domains? That’s not very much if you spread it out over a 1000 people, for example. :)
Better still… we think of ways to improve a modest stream of incoming funds that don’t solely rely on donuts.. er donations. That’s probably planning discussion; certainly is as far as it concerns the magazine and competitions. ;)
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Re: Themes, competitions, and Textgarden
I’m not saying that the various domains should all be sacrificed for subdomains, it’s too late for that (though if I was starting this project from scratch I would probably do that solely for the benefit of having everything housed under a single domain).
However, all the domains should be owned by the current project lead or even better a foundation, if that is viable.
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Re: Themes, competitions, and Textgarden
The donations funding system probably needs a rethink, that’s for sure. Don’t know how it can be done though.
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Re: Themes, competitions, and Textgarden
philwareham wrote:
So do you think can get Dean to transfer that domain to you?
Tried and hit radio silence.
Don’t know how it can be done though.
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