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Register to Vote on Rebid of ICANN Contracts

Posted by michael on from the no-confidence dept.

James Love writes "After a difficult debate, a body within ICANN, the DNSO "General Assembly," has agreed to hold a vote on whether or not to ask the US Department of Commerce to rebid its contracts with ICANN. A rebid would provide an opportunity for the public to reject the current Lynn/ICANN/Staff/Board proposal for reorganization, and to consider also alternatives to ICANN, including those that would be more accountable, less coercive and considerably less ambitious in terms of exercising control over the Internet. It appears as though this vote will be held the week of May 13-17. The ICANN DNSO General Assembly has historically been a forum for talking about ICANN issues, but it has no actual power, and rarely permits votes on substantive issue. Indeed, since its creation, there have been only 11 votes, just two of which involved policy issues. Anyone can register to vote in these elections, which are not binding on ICANN, but in this case would be timely and important, and could persuade the US Department of Commerce to get serious about dealing with an out of control ICANN. Go here to register to vote." There's a bunch of debate on this in the list archives of the DNSO mailing list.

1 of 7 comments (clear)

  1. My Experience with Linux by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    I work as a consultant for several fortune 500 companies, and I think I can shed a little light on the climate of the open source community at the moment. I believe that part of the reason that open source based startups are failing left and right is not an issue of marketing as it's commonly believed but more of an issue of the underlying technology.

    I know that that's a strong statement to make, but I have evidence to back it up! At one of the major corps(5000+ employees) that I consult for, we wanted to integrate Linux into our server pool. The allure of not having to pay any restrictive licensing fees was too great to ignore. I reccomended the installation of several boxes running the new 2.4.9 kernel, and my hopes were high that it would perform up to snuff with the Windows 2k boxes which were(and still are!) doing an AMAZING job at their respective tasks of serving HTTP requests, DNS, and fileserving.

    I consider myself to be very technically inclined having programmed in VB for the last 8 years doing kernel level programming. I don't believe in C programming because contrary to popular belief, VB can go just as low level as C and the newest VB compiler generates code that's every bit as fast. I took it upon myself to configure the system from scratch and even used an optimised version of gcc 3.1 to increase the execution speed of the binaries. I integrated the 3 machines I had configured into the server pool, and I'd have to say the results were less than impressive... We all know that linux isn't even close to being ready for the desktop, but I had heard that it was supposed to perform decently as a "server" based operating system. The 3 machines all went into swap immediately, and it was obvious that they weren't going to be able to handle the load in this "enterprise" environment. After running for less than 24 hours, 2 of them had experienced kernel panics caused by Bind and Apache crashing! Granted, Apache is a volunteer based project written by weekend hackers in their spare time while Microsft's IIS has an actual professional full fledged development team devoted to it. Not to mention the fact that the Linux kernel itself lacks any support for any type of journaled filesystem, memory protection, SMP support, etc, but I thought that since Linux is based on such "old" technology that it would run with some level of stability. After several days of this type of behaviour, we decided to reinstall windows 2k on the boxes to make sure it wasn't a hardware problem that was causing things to go wrong. The machines instantly shaped up and were seamlessly reintegrated into the server pool with just one Win2K machine doing more work than all 3 of the Linux boxes.

    Needless to say, I won't be reccomending Linux/FSF to anymore of my clients. I'm dissappointed that they won't be able to leverege the free cost of Linux to their advantage, but in this case I suppose the old adage stands true that, "you get what you pay for." I would have also liked to have access to the source code of the applications that we're running on our mission critical systems; however, from the looks of it, the Microsoft "shared source" program seems to offer all of the same freedoms as the GPL.

    As things stand now, I can understand using Linux in academia to compile simple "Hello World" style programs and learn C programming, but I'm afraid that for anything more than a hobby OS, Windows 98/NT/2K are your only choices.

    thank you.