[tialaramex]

Historically the Certbot software was named "letsencrypt" which certainly didn't make this easier to understand.

The not-for-profit is named ISRG (Internet Security Research Group) and so that's the entity trusted to actually run the Certificate Authority. Let's Encrypt is in some sense branding for this their main (only?) activity the same way you can still buy certificates with Thawte branding even though Thawte hasn't really existed for many years.

ACME is an IETF standardized protocol and so one of the things which has changed at Let's Encrypt is they gradually migrated from the ACME prototype they'd built and shipped to something that's (more or less) compliant to the IETF standard.

This is akin to how today Google's own web sites can talk Google's QUIC protocol (sometimes referred to as "gQUIC") but Google intends to rip that out once the IETF QUIC standard is published and have their sites just speak the standard QUIC instead (there may be a brief overlap where they speak both but it's likely to be very short because maintaining two protocols is far from free)

[jacquesm]

> Historically the Certbot software was named "letsencrypt" which certainly didn't make this easier to understand.

And to this day strongly promoted (recommended first option) right from the letsencrypt.org starter page:

https://letsencrypt.org/getting-started/

[remram]

That doesn't seem to be the case:

> Let’s Encrypt is a CA.

> We recommend that most people with shell access use the Certbot ACME client.

[jacquesm]

I don't understand you. You say it doesn't seem to be the case and then quote the exact part that proves that it does.

[ylyn]

I (native English) first interpreted your comment as saying that "letsencrypt" is promoted. The other person probably read it the same way.

[ryandrake]

Huge stumbling block and source of confusion for me. During the steep learning curve setting it up, I'd often search online for help/tutorials and they'd all reference "certbot" which I couldn't find anywhere on my system. As a newbie, I frequently said "WTF is this certbot thing, I'm using letsencrypt!" Wasn't clear at all. At some point during my system updates, /usr/bin/letsencrypt became a symbolic link to /usr/bin/certbot and it became obvious.

[marcan_42]

Sounds like you were running a distro that didn't keep its packages updated. By the time everyone was calling it 'certbot', well, it was called certbot.