One of the very positive things that the internet has
enabled over the past few years is the proliferation of the Open-Source community.
Right now there are many thousands of open-source projects which use a .org domain
to seperate them from their more commercial cousins. I myself operate one.
Very few of these are proper "organisations", although all open source software is
by definition, non-profit. At the same time there are now many companies that
make money by supporting open source software. Typically these companies use
a .com for their commercial activities and a .org for the open source projects they
support. This system works very well and the majority of the community understand
this. I would therefore like to propose that, in addition to non-profit
organisations, open source projects be allowed to maintain their hold in the .org
TLD. The fact that it is an organisation, a company or an individual makes
no difference to the open source nature of any given project, and should therefore
make no difference to the ability to have a .org domain.
Please consider
this in your meeting on March 12th.
Paul Bristow