As people know from reading the footer on Drupal.org, Dries is the owner of the trademark "Drupal". Trademarks -and law in general- are complicated; not something every Drupal coder, tester, user might understand or is even interested in.

However, there are always people that are not interested in the community, do not care about the law, but only care for themselves. They want to make money abusing the assets of the Drupal community and not by using it, contributing to it.

One of those kinds of people registered Drupal.nl some time ago, claiming it was an internal name for a service called "Domain name Registration tool Using PHP And Linux... And ran an anti Open Source CMS site on the domain claiming that Open Source solution where thousands of people are working on and millions of people use every day, could never be as good as his own home made CMS.

Dries wrote this man a letter, a letter stating that Dries as the owner of the Drupal trademark would like to get the ownership of the domain. We had an agreement however, the man sold it to another person days before he would transfer the domain to Dries.

This new owner will be named here; Robert de Bock from Me in IT.nl. So we had to start again, contacting him. But Robert was different; he knows about Open Source, cares about Drupal and without any legal pushing transferred the domain free towards Dries! So a big "Hooray" for Robert de Bock, a nice person that bought in good faith the Drupal.NL domain and when Dries contacted him handed al rights of the domain to Dries!

krokodil-boerland-home:~ bert$ whois drupal.nl
Domain name:
drupal.nl

Status: active

Registrant:
BUY000971-LEASE
D Buytaert
...
Administrative contact:
BUY000943-LEASE
D. Buytaert
...

If you visit Drupal.NL right now, it will be redirected to the Dutch Drupal.BE site. This might or might not change in the future, that is up to Dries. But at least we do not have a Drupal.NL site running on the web claiming that Open Source is bad.

Thank you Robert for contributing the domain to Dries and thereby to the bigger Drupal community!

The first owner? Lets forget about him.
The windmill? It's located in the village I live and just there as a cliché. We do not walk on wooden shoes, we don not life in windmills and we do not smoke weed. But we do care about Drupal and domain names.