In January 1999, Simon Tatham released the first public version of the SSH client PuTTY, hosting the project's website on his homepage www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/. In October 1999, the domain putty.org was registered by an unknown reseller, which was later purchased in 2008 by Denis Bider, co-founder of Bitvise. After the purchase, the putty.org website featured information about the SSH client PuTTY along with a screenshot and a link to the download page leading to the main project site. Additionally, the page included links to proprietary SSH servers and clients from Bitvise.
In 2016, following remarks that the website gave the impression of Bitvise's involvement in the development of PuTTY, a note was added to the page stating that the mentioned Bitvise products are not related to PuTTY and should not be seen as endorsed by the PuTTY project. In 2018, a 'FAQ' page was added to the website, stating that Bitvise has no relation to PuTTY but develops its own SSH server compatible with PuTTY. The FAQ also mentioned that many Bitvise clients use PuTTY and are forced to search for the project's download page, which is why the company acquired domain and created a separate site.
Over time, the putty.org website has come to be viewed by some users as the primary entry point for downloading PuTTY, and when searching in Google, Yandex, DuckDuckGo, and Bing for the keyword 'putty', the putty.org domain ranks higher than the official project page www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty. The putty.org site is also frequently mentioned in discussions and recommendations related to PuTTY.
On July 13, one of the bloggers published a note criticizing the use of the putty.org domain to promote Bitvise products and calling for the domain to be returned to the developer of PuTTY. It was claimed that Bitvise misleads users, takes advantage of the resulting confusion, and abuses the trust in open-source software to promote its own SSH client, which competes with PuTTY.
Denis Bider from Bitvise, who owns the domain putty.org and is not affiliated with the development of PuTTY, responded that the PuTTY project initially did not own the domain and claims about returning a domain that the PuTTY project never had are unfounded and misleading. According to Denis, having purchased the domain and using it to redirect to the main download page, he acted without ulterior motives, and he placed links to his software to compensate for his expenses.
After correspondence with the author of the note, Denis Bider was offended, called the calls to free the domain the machinations of communists, and replaced the content of the site, starting to use it for disseminating conspiracy and anti-vaccine theories that do not comply with the principles of evidence-based medicine. A link to download PuTTY was left but moved to the very bottom of the page. The motivation for the change was stated as the decision to use the page for a cause that, in the domain owner's opinion, would serve the common good, given that the page is popular.
Source: opennet.ru
