Here’s what I’ve been able to see, with regard to nunit.net and your overall program as described on your site. You are offering people something they could have for themselves, usually at a minor cost, except for the fact that you have it already. You’re offering to sell it back, except instead of cash you want some sort of endorsement. Unless I missed something, that sounds pretty much like what the squatters do.

In the case of nunit.net, you acquired it just as anyone else could have acquired it. It was available and we passed it up. We definitely left the door open for any squatter to acquire it, and you did. If there’s something here that distinguishes it from other folks who acquire sites as a part of their business model, please explain.

I have no problem with someone making money out of internet domains - well, it’s not my favorite thing, but it’s a perfectly legal activity anyway. But when someone tries to pretend that they aren’t working a business model, but are actually out there “doing good” it annoys me.

I wrote your company - actually the whois contact for nunit.net - way back, when I discovered it had been squatted. I said essentially this:

I can’t do anything about your acquisition of nunit.net. If you make any use of it that violates any copyright, trademark or other protection, I can and will take action.

That remains true. If you truly see yourself as “doing good” in the community, I suggest that you take a second look. If a lot of smart people are suspicious of your intentions, then at best, you aren’t doing a good job of presenting your story. At worst, you’re one of the bad guys, whether you like it or not.

Please feel free to contact me directly, and I can explain my side of the story. The story is, I spent a lot of money to aquire WordPress.Com from a real squatter, Matt promised publicly to put up a link, and then once he obtained the domain, he broke his word. Unfortunately, I will have to spend more to work with a lawyer to take the domain back, and this will only hurt the WordPress community. I guess Matt does not really care about them.

If you want other people that have used OpenDomain, you might ask someone that REALLY represents the Open Community, like St Peter (Xmpp.Org).

This isn’t really on topic, but:

1. NUnit 2.2, 2.2.1 and 2.2.2 have all been run successfully on Beta 1, Beta 2 and the latest community releases. Since RTM is an internal phase of Microsoft development, we won’t be able to support it until/unless we see a copy. As I posted elsewhere, we aren’t exactly on Microsoft’s Christmas card list.

2. See the latest post here for a bit about the next NUnit release: http://nunit.com/blogs/?p=12

Let’s not continue this topic on this post, please.

Thanks,
John