Re: Renaming

[Richard Stallman]

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[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
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  > 1) Not every hosted service offers their software for self-hosting, so
  > there is no point in trying to make a distinction in these cases.

Yes, but that isn't a reason NOT to adopt this convention.

  > 2) Referring to a service by a name other than the one that is usually
  > used will make it harder for people to discover our information about
  > it when searching the web.

That is a good point, but it is a pitfall to be avoided, not an argument
against this convention.

We can easily make sure that searches for GitHub will find our page
about GitHub.com.  Isn't it enough to add a sentence, "When people
speak of GitHub, they mean the site GitHub.com, since the server
software for GitHub is not released."

For GitLab, we could say, instead, "This site runs a version of the
GitLab software, which is free/libre software that users also install on
other sites."  With a link to our evaluation of that software.

  > 3) Not every hosted service uses a single domain name, so we would
  > either have to list only one (which has the same problem as point #2)
  > or list all of them, which could be unwieldy in terms of presentation
  > and maintenance.

That might be a big problem or a little one.  Can you show an example
so we can see how bad this problem is in practice?

I tend to think that filing it under the best known domain name would
do the job, and we could mention some others in the text for the sake
of search.




-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)