Does anyone notice this? So someone bought old Solus website domain at solus-project.com and create a tech blog (?). They somehow also have article about Solus. I hope it doesn't have malicious intent and I just found it funny.
Someone bought old Solus website domain
alfisya I hope it doesn't have malicious intent and I just found it funny.
The only part of this that really annoys me, is that they're pretending to be The Solus Project. That's the organization name used in the real Solus copyrights. Do we have an attourney in the group who could use some pro bono work?
I was curious to find out more about this imposter, so I did an online search for The Solus Project. The result was a full page of articles about an exploration/survival video game. No mention of this blog, or Solus OS on the first page.
There was a time when I owned WetGeek.com, WetGeek.org, and WetGeek.net, although the only one I ever used for anything was WetGeek.net. These days, there are so many domain types available, that it would be nearly impossible to protect a name that way anymore.
found this on Steam
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mw42815 classic
Do I have to pay to read articles and reviews on solos?
Thank God the answer to that is "No", because an affirmative to "Do I have to pay for [misspelled product name]?" is never a good look 
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I finally got a hit on The Solus Project. Seems that they're quite aware of our Solus, and I didn't see any effort to disambiguate. Apparently they're fine with anyone thinking it's their OS.
WTF??? "Red Hat Solus is free. Red Hat Solus is also an open-source Linux distribution that uses the budgie package manager as its default desktop environment."
I've never seen so many mistakes in a review. I can't imagine he's ever actually tried Solus
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WetGeek It's probably average word-salad blogspam. Or maybe it's an AI predicting the future. Who knows.
The bottom of the picture of the original post was enough to burn me up.
Yet the ones responsible for that screenie weren't courageous enough to try anything like "The Solus logo is Copyright © 2016-2021 Solus Project." which is at the bottom of the main page of this forum. (Quick, get copyright for this year about to be over, don't let it get stolen!)
I use free programming/development software that has this same identity crisis. It's because there was an altercation this spring, just about when I first posted on this forum. "dot-com", then "dot-net", then "longer-name-than-before-dot-com" because the original "dot-com" was too expensive. Subsequently the "dot-com" was taken by somebody who had to be "official". The two sides are still unfriendly to each other. I just want to use the software and help out people in the forum, thanks.
LOL at "Red Hat" Solus, this could be the lack of general education about Linux. IMHO helped a lot by the memes out there about Windows users considering Linux users "too weird" and things of that nature.
There is no coherent article on that site. Everything looks like a copy-paste, jumble, mixmatch of many article on the web. I feel like I have seen some of that sentence from Solus Help Center
WetGeek I was curious to find out more about this imposter, so I did an online search for The Solus Project. The result was a full page of articles about an exploration/survival video game. No mention of this blog, or Solus OS on the first page.
Its coming from Bing Indonesia. By default Bing in Indonesia has limited search and this is the top if you search "solus"
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WetGeek The only part of this that really annoys me, is that they're pretending to be The Solus Project. That's the organization name used in the real Solus copyrights. Do we have an attourney in the group who could use some pro bono work?
"Solus Project" is not exclusive to Solus, nor is the term "Solus Project" copyrighted or registered as a trademark by Solus. Solus protects the Solus logo and the "Solus" name, and Solus (through Beatrice) is the registered owner of the "getsol.us" domain. I can't tell whether or not the "Solus Project" (in the sense of the community's "Solus Project") is a legal entity or not without doing a lot of business/corporate registration searching. As far as I can tell, however, the "Solus Project" is a Github name but not an entity.
The term "Solus Project" is most closely associated with a circa-2013 computer game developed by Teotl Studios and Grip Games. Teotl and Grip own the registered domain "thesolusproject.com". Many other companies (e.g. "Solus Inc", "Solus LLC", "SOLUS", "Solus Alternative Asset Management", "Solus BioTech", "Solus Security Systems" and so on) use the term "Solus" and have "nnn-solus-nnn.x" domains of one sort or another. None of those companies are in conflict with Solus, in my view[FN] because the term "Solus" is not unique and there is little likelihood that any of those companies would be confused with Solus.
Solus would be on a fool's errand, in my personal opinion[FN], if it tried to fight on the grounds of a protected copyright or trademark, because the SolusProject website holds itself out as a "technology blog" rather than an operating system, the SolusProject website does not hold itself out as affiliated with Solus, and Solus does not, at least on our website, protect the "Solus Project" name with a trademark or copyright.
If any company has grounds to complain that the SolusProject website has appropriated the "Solus Project" name in violation of copyright/trademark laws, it would be Teotl Studios and Grip Games, not Solus. But it also seems to me[FN] that Teotl Studios and Grip Games would have an uphill battle trying to do so for the same reasons that Solus would.
alfisya Its coming from Bing Indonesia. By default Bing in Indonesia has limited search and this is the top if you search "solus"
I wonder if other search engines in Indonesia produce the same result. I live in the US, so I can't check, obviously, but none of the search engines I checked in the US (e.g. Bing, Google, DuckDuckGo) list the website on the first page of results.
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[FN] Disclosure: My views on this subject express my personal opinion and should not be interpreted as a legal opinion or legal advice. Although I am admitted to the bar in several states and federal jurisdictions in the US, my current status in each is either "inactive in good standing" or "retired in good standing". In that status, I am not permitted to hold myself out as a practicing attorney or render legal advice of any kind. My view on this subject is a personal opinion, not a legal opinion or legal advice. If Solus wants legal advice, it should consult a lawyer who is in active practice and specializes in copyright/trademark law.
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alfisya There is no coherent article on that site. Everything looks like a copy-paste, jumble, mixmatch of many article on the web.
That's more-or-less true of all the articles on the SolusProject site, at least the half-dozen or so I've taken the time to read.
The SolusProject blog seems to be a one-man show (everything I've looked was authored by "Michael barns") and it isn't clear to me what the purpose of the SolusProject site might be. I would have guessed that it was click-bait for advertising revenue, but I don't see any ads on the site. Maybe it is a vanity project.
tomscharbach I wonder if other search engines in Indonesia produce the same result.
Nope, only Bing. Google, Startpage, Duckduckgo and my default Brave doesn't output such result. All of them refer to getsol.us or wikipedia page.
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alfisya Nope, only Bing. Google, Startpage, Duckduckgo and my default Brave doesn't output such result. All of them refer to getsol.us or wikipedia page.
Very interesting. I knew that Indonesia has relatively tight censorship provisions about certain subject/topics considered offensive to Islam, blocking numerous websites as a result, but I didn't know that Indonesia interfered with search engine rankings for sites not blocked.
I have no idea why the SolusProject website would be elevated in Indonesian search results because all indications are the SolusProject website is US-based with no visible ties to Indonesia. I have no idea why Microsoft (that is, Bing) would be affected and other companies (e.g. Google) would not. I'm particularly surprised in the case of DuckDuckGo because I understand that DDG leverages the Bing search engine.
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