Following a tale of betrayal and threats, the team behind the popular Android ROM CyanogenMod is moving its online presence to a new .org domain. It was discovered that the owner of CyanogenMod.com and associated social network accounts had been impersonating Steve Kondik — aka Cyanogen himself — in an attempt to make money from referral deals with other sites.
So yeah, it's cyanogenmod.ORG from now on. And of course get.cm.
— cyanogen (@cyanogen) November 14, 2012
When confronted over this by the non-profit Cyanogen team and asked to relinquish control, this person demanded $10,000 for the domain, according to CyanogenMod PR head Abhisek Devkota. After realizing that payment would not be forthcoming, the person deleted all of CyanogenMod's records and sent the domain offline. The team is in the process of relocating to a new server hosted at CyanogenMod.org and has lodged a dispute with ICANN to regain control of the original domain.
The CyanogenMod team says its .com domain was bought and donated back in 2009 when the project had little funding or online presence, and is "deeply hurt" at what it considers betrayal fueled by greed. However this situation gets untangled, it doesn't look like the best way to celebrate yesterday's official launch of CyanogenMod 10.
Update: A few minutes after this story was posted, Kondik announced via Twitter that the dispute has been resolved. Details of the resolution haven't been released, but are apparently forthcoming.
We have our domain back and everything was resolved amicably. More info on the way. Let's just forget about this.
— cyanogen (@cyanogen) November 15, 2012