Joachim Breitner

Ubuntu ownz Utnubu - right from the start

Published 2006-01-12 in sections English, Debian.

Today, Andreas Tille noticed that utnubu.org points to ubuntu.org (and not, as he expected, to the Utnubu Team's website). This made me curious and a little whois query gave away that utnubu.org is indeed owned by Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu. This is not strage, they have other variations registered, like xubuntu.org (which I noticed when writing German parody news on Xubuntu).

What is interesting is the fact that I announced Utnubu on debian-project at Sat, 16 Jul 2005 20:55:08 +0300 and the domain was registered at 16-Jul-2005 22:09:37 UTC by James Troup.

I just assume that Canonical did that to give us the domain as soon as we need it, and they just reserved it for us since we don't have money. Very nice. (But why didn't the tell anyone? Well, I just assume they forgot, no need to wake sleeping dogs.)

Comments

Syndicated blog posts. How discreet.



- Chris
#1 Chris Cunningham (Homepage) am 2006-01-12
Sorry, this comment is too much for my limited knowledge of the english language. Can someone tell me what Chris wants to say?
#2 Joachim Breitner (Homepage) am 2006-01-12
Nice to see such fast response. :)
#3 Emilio am 2006-01-12
Sorry. What I meant was that I didn't think your blog was the best place to initially note this. I had a look on a few relevant Ubuntu and Debian lists and couldn't find any posts from you on the subject, so I thought I would mention it here.



Utnubu is an unofficial interoperability project. It could quite easily be mistaken for an official project. Even if the domain *was* registered for your benefit, those working on Ubuntu would be wise to ensure that similar domain names were registered with them to avoid abuse in the first instance.



Announcing this on your blog (which is read widely by both DDs and outsiders) is likely to make some people think that this was malicious behaviour by Canonical (it certainly reads as though you are suggesting this). As I couldn't find any evidence of you having checked this beforehand, I thought I'd mention it.
#4 Chris Cunningham (Homepage) am 2006-01-13
Well, this was discussed at the same time on utnubu-discuss (this is where Andreas Tille first noticed), and I replied there with about the same text.



I'm not implying that Canonical did anything bad. After all, I want to continue working with them, otherwise Utnubu makes no sense. But on the other hand, it is an odd thing (and odd things go to my blog, since I don't have a cat to write about), and you have to admit that it is strange that nobody told us.



A short "nice idear, your project. to prevert abuse of the domain, we took the freedom to register it, just that you know" should have possible, shoudn't it?
#5 Joachim Breitner (Homepage) am 2006-01-13
How odd.



This would make sense if they had registered utnubu and ubnutu and other misspellings at the same time, but it doesn't seem they have.
#6 Ken Bloom am 2006-01-13

Have something to say? You can post a comment by sending an e-Mail to me at <mail@joachim-breitner.de>, and I will include it here.

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