In January 1999, Simon Tatham released the first public release of the SSH client PuTTY, hosting the project site on his homepage www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/. In October 1999, the putty.org domain was registered by an unknown reseller, after which it was purchased in 2008 by Denis Bider, co-founder of Bitvise. After the purchase, the putty.org site featured information about the SSH client PuTTY along with a screenshot and a link to the download page leading to the main project site. At the same time, links to Bitvise's proprietary SSH server and SSH client were posted on the page.
In 2016, following comments that the site 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 in no way related to PuTTY and should not be perceived as recommended by the PuTTY project. In 2018, a FAQ page was added to the site stating that Bitvise had no affiliation with PuTTY but was developing its own SSH server compatible with PuTTY. The FAQ also mentioned that many Bitvise clients use PuTTY and are forced to look for the project's download page, which is why the company purchased domain and created a separate site.
Over time, the putty.org site has come to be perceived by some users as the main entry point for downloading PuTTY, and when searching on Google, Yandex, Duckduckgo, and Bing for the keyword "putty," the putty.org domain appears higher than the official project page www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty. The site putty.org 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 advertise Bitvise products and calling for the domain to be returned to the PuTTY developer. It is claimed that Bitvise misleads users, takes advantage of the resulting confusion, and abuses trust in open-source software to promote its own SSH client, which competes with PuTTY.
Denis Bider, a representative from Bitvise, who owns the domain putty.org and is in no way connected to the development of PuTTY, responded that the PuTTY project never originally owned the domain and the discussions about the return of a domain that the PuTTY project never had are unfounded and misleading. According to Denis, acquiring the domain and using it to redirect to the main download page was done without selfish motives, and the links to his software were placed to offset his costs.
After a correspondence with the note's author, Denis Bider was offended, called the calls to free the domain the machinations of communists, and replaced the site's content, starting to use it for spreading conspiracy and anti-vaccination theories that do not align with evidence-based medicine standards. The link to download PuTTY was left but moved to the very bottom of the page. As a reason for the change, it was stated that since the page is popular, it was decided to use it for a cause that, in the domain owner's opinion, would serve the common good.
Forrás: opennet.ru
