Hijacking Trust? Bitvise Under Fire for Controlling Domain of FOSS Project PuTTY

Point of information.

From that doc:

A.9.3 Would you like me to register you a nicer domain name?

No, thank you. Even if you can find one (most of them seem to have been registered already, by people who didn't ask whether we actually wanted it before they applied), we're happy with the PuTTY web site being exactly where it is. It's not hard to find (just type ‘putty’ into google.com and we're the first link returned) ...

Searching for "putty ssh" on both DDG and Google now return putty.org as their top result.

Here's a framing of the problem.

There's software called PuTTY, and non-technical or less technical people, or even technical people who are running on autopilot, might reasonably expect that it's hosted on putty.org.

They just need to be more careful.

Here's an analogy.

Even capable programmers keep screwing up when using C and end up with memory leaks and security vulnerabilities. But that's no reason to stop using it ... people should just be more careful.

No analogy is perfect, every example has problems and loopholes, but this seems a reasonable one. Just as people should use programming languages that make it harder to make mistakes, so companies should not behave in deceptive manners, and when they do, they should be called out on it.

Except Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing all return putty.org as the top result. The "official" PuTTY website appears as either the 2nd or 3rd result.

putty.org has this on their page:

> On July 13, 2025, Bitvise was contacted by a political interrogator posing as a journalist.

They are doing a great job of making themselves look like assholes.

Google (not saying it's a good search engine, but people use it) puts putty.org at the top of search results.

The results shows as:

  Download PuTTY - a free SSH and telnet client for Windows.
  PuTTY is an SSH and telnet client, developed originally by Simon Tatham for the Windows platform. PuTTY is open source software that is available with source...

How does your example relate? keepass.info is the official Keepass website, owned by the Keepass developer.

I see where you're coming from, but I think your examples actually prove the opposite point.

I've always seen Linux and Git not as projects run by a committee, but as projects guided by a single, trusted leader. Linus Torvalds is the owner of the kernel's vision. He has the final say. That isn't community consensus; it's benevolent dictatorship.

So while the putty.org situation is shady, I believe the core idea is right: great software needs a final arbiter with a clear vision, not just a crowd.

LLM written, spurring up controversy, holding a private company accountable like they are the government. If they - PuTTY - is bothered enough, they are allowed to sue or request a takedown, and if legal grounds are not viable I don't think Google would mind ranking the correct website up after request. This "issue" has been present for years and this journalist picks up on it, presses on the guy as if he was in the Panama Papers or something and writes the article with newgen LLM no less. Disgraceful.

[delayed]

Certainly it's one basis for dispute (but only if it is trademarked): https://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/

extremely subjective. the damage of allowing schoolmarm types to determine laws based on what they think is parasitic or deceptive is more dangerous than the unambiguous and coherent concept of property. PuTTY owns https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/ There are a number of strings in this domain that cause me great distress. Should I be allowed to seize their property?

It's a company who bought the domain of the exact name of the largest open source project that they directly compete with and then advertise themselves on it? This is at the very least unethical. You can't just use a competitors exact name to run a website that tries to snipe users looking for your competitor and call it a "fan site".

The comments on this submission are pretty strange. What are the chances that a bunch of non-sockpuppet HN type of people are in support of this kind of garbage? Generally with sort of abysmal behaviour like the email communication in the article, there's people going to bat against actually defensible actions purely in the name of civility on HN. These bitvise people seem bad from both angles and yet the of early comments are either ignoring the issue and redirecting (e.g. "who even uses putty") or outright defending their shitty behaviour?

It's a free ad!

Yes, but an outdated and broken version usually. You'd have to install mingw or cygwin for a proper one, or use a Linux VM like w4lv2.

I use putty on linux. now what?

Putty isn't just ssh, it's also the VTE and serial terminal. Also it has its own keys/configs/shortcuts people are almost certainly used to. I don't think there's even an easy way to migrate putty shortcuts (I can't remember what they're called) to OpenSSH.