With the practicality of something that only worked on Debian systems aside...
> Between Let's Encrypt and StartCom ...
What do we have?
StartCom doesn't allow their free certificates to be used for commercial purposes and will hold you to ransom if you need to revoke it (eg. after a major vulnerability which exposes private keys).
Let's Encrypt only issue certificates that are valid for 90 days[0] because they want you to automate renewal by having your server automatically run their script which needs root privileges, and they use Google as the gatekeeper of who is allowed a certificate[1].
We are still short an option that issues certificates that are valid for 1+ years, which can be revoked at any time, can be used for any purpose and doesn't pass every request to a corporation for approval.
> Between Let's Encrypt and StartCom ...
What do we have?
StartCom doesn't allow their free certificates to be used for commercial purposes and will hold you to ransom if you need to revoke it (eg. after a major vulnerability which exposes private keys).
Let's Encrypt only issue certificates that are valid for 90 days[0] because they want you to automate renewal by having your server automatically run their script which needs root privileges, and they use Google as the gatekeeper of who is allowed a certificate[1].
We are still short an option that issues certificates that are valid for 1+ years, which can be revoked at any time, can be used for any purpose and doesn't pass every request to a corporation for approval.
[0] https://letsencrypt.org/2015/11/09/why-90-days.html
[1] https://letsencrypt.org/2015/10/29/phishing-and-malware.html