[PHP-DEV] php.org and www.motherboards.com From: Zeev Suraski (zeev <email protected>)
Date: 11/13/00

Yesterday, to my surprise, I found out that www.php.org is alive, and is
being forwarded to www.motherboards.com. Beforehand, the domain was owned
by Premier Health Partners, but was never used. www.motherboards.com is
using PHP extensively, but other than that, I couldn't figure out any
relationship between php.org and this site.

In the last 24 hours, I've been in contact with Greg Ricks, the
administrative and technical contact for this domain. I was trying to
exploit the possibility of receiving the php.org to our hands.

The bottom line is this:

He's willing to "redirect all of the www.php.org traffic to us, in exchange
for banners on the PHP network". I discussed this with him, and told him
we could probably live with a predefined period of a banner ad at the
bottom of the PHP network, a-la the 'Hosted By' banners that we currently
have. I told him, though, that it'd be crucial to receive the actual
domain to our control, since if php.org becomes known as the home of PHP
(*), we can't be held hostage by someone who may make www.php.org point
someplace else at will.

I tried to convince him to hand over the domain, in exchange for these
banners (gave him some www.php.net stats, which are quite impressive) and
even some sum of money, but he declined. He's completely unwilling to
sell/give the domain.

Does anybody know if we have any options to go about this? Legal
perhaps? We can obviously send an army of furious people down his mailbox,
but I'm not sure if it'll be of any use (it might). Bad publicity can suck
pretty much, especially when he's being extremely ungrateful, considering
his entire site is PHP based. Perhaps we can use clause 3 of the license
here? Any lawyers on board? :)

Comments welcome,

Zeev

(*) This will happen very quickly IMHO, I'm pretty sure anybody who looks
for PHP and doesn't *know* where it is, would look for it at php.org. By
the way, he claims that he plans to do something with that domain in the
future, and that it's only temporarily pointing at
www.motherboards.com. I'm not sure if he's right or not, but one thing is
for sure - he's definitely gettings tons of hits from people who are
looking for PHP (the fact 'PHP' appears as the default search string in
case you access motherboards.com through www.php.org is also quite
interesting). 

--
Zeev Suraski   <zeev <email protected>>
CTO, Zend Technologies Ltd.  http://www.zend.com/

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