[Mageia-discuss] Thank you - Merci - Danke - Gracias - Grazie - Obrigado - спасибо

[Michael Scherer]

Le mardi 21 septembre 2010 à 16:53 -0400, Marc Paré a écrit :

> Would it make sense to also have a section for "mageia" domain owners to 
> track domain owners who are willing to cooperate? You will eventually 
> have to do this anyway. I would also consider this also a type of offer 
> of cooperation and help.

Personally, I think we should not collect all domain names to give them
to the association :

1) each domain name will need admin time. Either to manage ( ie, set up
vhost, setup the zone, add a entry to the zone etc ), or to renew. While
renewing 1 domain name every year is easy, renewing 10 or 20 on 10 to 20
different resellers, for different prices and so on will be quite
annoying. 

2) this will also generate work for people in charge of comptability,
and we know that people doing the work of a CFO are a scarce ressources
( CFO may not be the proper word, but I didn't found better ).

3) too much domain name will cost money. I think that what ever we have,
money would likely better used everywhere than domain name.


Next it depend on what we do for the domain, but basically, either it is
use for http, or for mail.

If we use for http :

4) too much domain will be a pain from a ssl point of view. If we start
to need ssl for a site, and there is 10 Vhost for it, we will just have
10 time the work to renew certificates.

5) too much domain will also requires more work for simple http, since
we will have lots of them. 

6) too much different url will just mean more confusion. I may also fear
this could be seen by major search engine as unethic SEO, and thus be
punished ( since link farm is a commonly used technic to try to hijack
some keywords ). But Google, Yahoo and Bing systems are closed source,
so I do not know.

If we use for mail :

7) too much domain will simply mean more spam. If we offer multiple
email ( like "example at mageia.org, and .de, and .fr and .cn, and so on ),
email will simply appear in more list, and therefore be more spammed.

8) too much domain will simply mean more work. Again, if we use every
domain for mail be it a multi domain alias, or worst, let the choice, we
will need to take this in account in lots of place in the information
system, and this will mean more work, more complexity, more fragility.

9) and of course, too much domain name, like for websites will mean more
confusion.

And finally, as I said before, we had a hard time finding a name because
because all the good one have been already used ( or trademarked ).
While people do not frivolously trademark name ( too costly ), there is
lots of domain name that are taken and finally unused. So by acting like
the others, we are simply causing trouble to others internet users. A
web site about magic trick could perfectly use mageia.tld without
causing trouble to us. A restaurant, anything could also do it. 

So 

10) by registering every possible variation, we are acting selfishly
toward others netizens.


So I do not really see what having lots of domain name would bring.
Maybe I do not see because I am root on the main dns server, maybe
because I already have my own domain name since so long time, I do not
know. 

The only answer I got was about security. But seriously, security of
what ? Protecting from people doing phishing ? Bank already fail at
this, and you think we can ? 

Protecting from people misusing the name ? there is trademark laws and
various others way ( not to mention that I do not see much to misuse at
the moment ).

And frankly, there is too much variation beside top level domain to be
exhaustive to protect anything. 


So for the 10 reasons I gave, and because I see almost no benefit, I
think the association shouldn't manage so much domains. I cannot prevent
people from renting them, but my 2 last point ( 9 and 10 ) still apply,
IMHO.
-- 
Michael Scherer