Owner of CyanogenMod.com begins shutting down site after asking for $10,000, CM’s founders work to gain control [Updated]

The folks who run CyanogenMod, the website that hosts open source software for a slew of Android devices, announced that the CyanogenMod.com website is no longer under their control. CyanogenMod.com was a gift to the team from the original domain owner (a non-staff member); however, he took it back today after the owners of CyanogenMod rejected his $10,000 offer and his shenanigans throughout the network (which included impersonating founder Steve Kondik to set up referral deals). Even with the domain loss, the community still plans to flourish under its CyanogenMod.org domain name while its dispute with ICANN is underway. We hope things are restored quickly, as CyanogenMod plays a huge role in the community.

Fast-forward 3 years, we have 3 extremely powerful build boxes donated by the community and an army of developers, contributors, and supported devices. But, a little over a week ago, things took a bad turn. The person owning the CyanogenMod.com domain was caught impersonating Steve to make referral deals with community sites. When confronted and asked to hand over control of the domain amicably, he decided he wanted 10K USD for it, which we won’t (and can’t) pay.

Update: Cyanogen has news this evening about the issues being resolved:

With that said, the ex-member in question contacted us and has agreed to hand over control of the CyanogenMod.com domain. This was done as amicably as these things can be, and CM did not pay the fee he requested.

We will still be using CyanogenMod.org as our primary domain, and the .com address will simply redirect to this new domain. Ironically enough, ‘.org’ is better than ‘.com’ as we are not a commercial entity, and is far more in line with how CyanogenMod is structured.

[CyanogenMod, XDA Developers via Droid Life]