From: Ben Giddings <bg-rubytalk@...>
Date: 2005-01-20T02:04:42+09:00
Subject: Re: Best ways to accelerate Ruby's popularity

Joel VanderWerf wrote:
> I like it. It would reduce the number of ruby bookmarks one needs to 
> carry around from computer to computer.

Yeah, as I wrote that, I realized how many important ruby sites there 
are out there.  Even I know that I'll find Python at python.org, Perl at 
perl.org, but ruby...

Ruby's most central site is "ruby-lang.org".
Documentation is at "ruby-doc.org"
Some applications are hosted at "rubyforge.org"
Other applications are listed at "raa.ruby-lang.org"
The old pickaxe, and some documentation is at "rubycentral.com"
The wiki is at "rubygarden.org"
The mailing list archives are at "ruby-talk.org" (and blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp)

That's a whole lot of URLS, all of which are fairly important.

So right now "ruby.org" is held by "netidentity.com", who brag about 
owning over 15,000 popular surname-based domain names.  I wonder if it 
might be possible to get the ruby.org domain.  From a little poking 
around, it doesn't look like ruby.org is used much.  When I did a google 
search for it, virtually all the links were ruby-language related, 
including one from January 2003 where there was some discussion of 
buying the domain.

I did some searches of common first names, and every single one I tried 
was available.

It may be that netidentity has nobody actually using the ruby.org 
domain, or at least so few that they might be willing to sell it.

Aside from money, we could offer them a lot of good press.  Googlefights 
says more people talk about Ruby than about Netidentity:

ruby
(26 500 000 results)
	
versus
	
netidentity
( 15 200 results)

So, maybe they'd be happy to have all kinds of praise heaped on them by 
the Ruby community, and be able to brag about helping out the free 
software community?

Now that we have a US non-profit, maybe this would be a good cause for 
them to pursue?

Ben