Re: Sunsite's Policy On Domain Names

[Esben Haabendal Soerensen <bart@sunsite.auc.dk>]

>>>>> "Christian" == Christian Reiniger <warewolf@mayn.de>
>>>>> "Paul" == Paul Tiseo <ptiseo@mediaone.net>
>>>>> "Esben" == Esben Haabendal Soerensen <bart@sunsite.auc.dk>

Esben> I just hope that you do not decide to waste all the efforts by
Esben> dumping SunSITE because of the lgdc.org domain hosting.

Christian> Surely not

Esben> At our last staff meeting, I brought the subject up.  The rules
Esben> are very clear: we do not accept domain hosting, and to make this
Esben> clearer and easier to enforce, we also do not want to be "masked
Esben> out" by some proxy-like system.

Christian> Ok.

Esben> It is ok to setup the lgdc.org domain to redirect to SunSITE, and
Esben> to setup mirrors of the lgdc site, but unless you keep
Esben> http://sunsite.auc.dk/lgdc as your primary site, I am afraid the
Esben> staff group will rule that lgdc does not appreciate our service,
Esben> and will be "closed".

Paul> with our current plans: mirror content such as articles & tutorials
Paul> to sites interested and keep *really* dynamic content such as
Paul> web-based threaded discussion on sunsite. Esben, my main contact,
Paul> has been very responsive and helpful. He is genuinely interested in
Paul> helping linux projects and I have enjoyed his efforts on our
Paul> behalf. He has set up phpPolls, phpMyAdmin and Phorum at my request
Paul> over the lst few weeks, amongst many other things he surely has to
Paul> do to keep other groups happy.
Paul> 
Paul> Once we are gold, we can look into a lgdc.org redirect, but
Paul> apparently, the sunsite url ultimately cannot be masked. I guess
Paul> this is an issue that should be addressed by the group, because we
Paul> were once speaking of doing that...
Paul> 
Paul> Does anyone have a problem with www.lgdc.org being just a redirect?

Christian> Well, yes. I very much prefer having it as mirror of
Christian> sunsite.auc.dk/lgdc/, as that allows visitors to stay at
Christian> the same domain when they follow (most) internal links.  A
Christian> simple redirect is IMHO confusing.

I fully understand your point, but as Paul mentioned we had this
subject up for debate at the last SunSITE staff meeting, and the
decission we made stands:


We do not want to host projects which cannot live with the url we
provide.  The reasons for this are many, and I will not try and cover
the whole background for the decision here, but I can give it a try
anyways.

SunSITE is a completely non-commercial organisation and live only by
the hardware donations from sponsors and the free work made by the
staff members.

At the same time we do not wish to put any banner adds (flashing or
not) anywhere on our website, and especially not enforce or projects
to do so, actually we do our best to stop SunSITE projects doing so,
as that will conflict the non-commercial nature of SunSITE.

The only exposure we give ourselves is our hostname,
"sunsite.auc.dk", which hopefully also redirects some exposure to our
list of sponsors, encouraging more donations to us :-)

Our honest opinion is therefore that if we give up the exposure of our
hostname for the projects we could just as well close up, and find
something else to spend our free time on.


I sincerely hope that you can understand and respect our decission,
and still feel that our services are attractive for LGDC.

But if you prefer to move from SunSITE to some other webhosting, which
will host you as www.lgdc.org (and probably require you to splash adds
all over your site...) please let us know.

/bart
-- 
if (argc > 1 && strcmp(argv[1], "-advice") == 0) {
   printf("Don't Panic!\n");
   exit(42);
}               /* Arnold Robbins in the LJ of February '95, describing RCS */