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Open-Source Pioneers Make Bid for .org
wdb writes: "A NY Times article (free subscription required) describes the competition surrounding control of the .org domain, which Verisign coughed up in order to keep .com and .net from going to the highest bidder. Open source and Internet pioneers Paul Vixie and Carl Malamud have entered the fray; central to their bid is their announced intent to place all the software necessary to manage a TLD in the public domain. 'This shouldn't be a dot-com opportunity,' Mr. Malamud said. 'There has been a lot of smoke and mirrors, but what we need is actually a public utility that is well managed in the public interest.'"
We need to see more of the "open source type's" plan before anyone can make a real decision, but I can say on no uncertain terms that if .org should controlled by advocates of the community then the support to ensure that they are the best qualified will be available.
The alternative would be to turn it over to people with personal interests in milking the .org for what its worth and have no incentive to manage it well since profit is the primary motive
DNS may have to follow something similar to what I believe has happened to the internet over the past few years. In the "beginning" of the popular Internet, everyone visits a small set of gopher sites, soon followed by first generation web sites. Then came search engines. The number of site people spend visition skyrocketed. You might never see the same site twice in a month, even though you were ssurfing all day. This doesn't include yahoo. This is phase two. Soon people realized there were just too many bad useless sites on the internet. Phase three is the portal. A portal is any site that collects information from other sources, giving a single site to visit for information. Slashdot is a good example, although what you normally think of as partals are good too. Now adays, you probably only visit a few sites on a regular basis. Phase three complete.
Here is how I see DNS going.
Phase 1. Domain names just made it so you didn't have to remember IP addresses. Think sunsite.unc.edu. That was a "site". It didn't need to be sunsite.com. My email address is a perfect example. "ix.netcom.com". Nobody thought better of it.
Phase 2. Today the "ix." throws all non-technical people off. They just don't understand or see the reason for sub domains. A domain IS the site. All site are thesite.com. Hell, most people don't even use the www anymore. You ever tried to explain the difference between ftp.server.com and www.server.com to anyone who has not been on the internet for many years? No, ftp.myserver.com doesn't mean that is the ftp site for myserver.com (although it may.) ftp is the name of the server. Server they say? Isn't there only one? How can myserver.com have more than one server? Try explaining it sometime, is was harder than I thought last time I tried.
Phase 3. The commercial dns. There are not enough words for every website to have a name unique to it ".com". Regardless of who runs it. The commercialization of DNS registars only makes matters worse. I predict in a few year, if it even takes that long, subdomain will be back in vague. There will not be any choice in the matter. Try finding a unique domain recent less than 8 characters? Tough, huh? Soon the public will learn "search google for keyword slashdot" to find slashdot. Dare I say "AOL Keyword whatever" in ads. Bookmark it if you like it once there, or go through the same process next time.
Where the internet went few-many-few in terms of sites you interact with. I predict DNS will go many-few-many for DNS subnames you see, and all this DNS stuff will do is make it so mere mortals don't have to look at IP's, just like the good old days.
wow, I just wrote a book, sorry. Anyway, I see DNS going through the equivilant of the web portals movement, but backwards. Then Verisign stock will plumit once investors realize DNS is dead.
DNS is dead...long live DNS.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
I would really want to check out Paul Vixie's intentions on this. I remember MAPS and how it went to a pay system after Orbs went bye-bye. I also remember Vixie being one of people who started the members-only bind group (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/02/03/16562 43&mode=nested&tid=95).
He has a history of taking a community thing and then kicking the community out of it.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but 3 lefts do - Lew of GO magazine
Of course! Why didn't I think of it before? Who better to serve the best interests of the public, than private enterprise? After all, I'm sure that they can be trusted to put civic duty above profits, in the extremely unlikely event that the two should ever conflict...
I completely understand when people talk to me about how they don't trust big government. They totally should. But then these same people talk about turning around and putting the administration of this country (my country being the U.S.) in the hands of for-profit corporations. To which I can only muster a "whhhaaa?"---------
We all live under Monkey Law.
stripShow - Where WordPress meets webcomics
You guys should take a look at OpenNIC, right now it's not under the influence of the corporate world and the open source community could build real and useful domain names (i.e. wine.oss for wine, slashdot.weblog, etc...)
Running a root name server is nothing like running one of the gTLD servers. Believe me, my company runs one of the roots and provides support for another root. I got yelled at the last time I said the name of my company, so you'll have to trust me (not that I'm bitter or anything).
;)), on higher-end boxes (the COM domain hasn't fit in a 32-bit memory space for 4 or so years now, and I expect that ORG probably doesn't these days). It also means using some sort of registry-registrar protocol for the comptetive registrars, and most importantly setting up administration to deal with these registrars, various end users, ICANN, and the like - meaning ticketing systems, account management, help desks, etc, etc.
Running a root name server basically means running BIND for a few hundred NS records in one zone file. You set up a cluster of boxes that run some random Unix variant, although to be honest a dual-CPU Athlon MP box could easily handle the load we see here. That's it.
Any web hosting company could run a root name server.
Running a gTLD, however, probably means running your own version of BIND (at least, I think Verisign runs a tweaked version for their domains - not that Vixie would have any trouble tweaking BIND
Not rocket science, but an entirely different ball of wax.
espo
I try to refrain from "me too" posts but I can't help myself. If any changes are on the horizon how does it effect those of us who already have a .org domain? I have some years invested in this by now and though my use of .org may not have been what the founders intended it has become part of my online identity. (I know that doesn't mean much to anyone but me and the people I am in direct contact with.)
I have to wonder how this would effect those of use who already paid our dimes.
I wonder, does anyone mistake .uk or .nz people for being overly patriotic?
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We all live under Monkey Law.
stripShow - Where WordPress meets webcomics
Paul got the crap sued out of him by spammers, from what I've heard, and had no choice but to turn MAPS into a subscriber service. AFAIK he never promised to do anything other than that, and it operated for free for quite a while.
He has been extremely scrupulous with the Internet Software Consortium. I know of few people whose integrity I trust more. I would trust him with the title to my house.
Regarding the members-only thing, somebody got to pay de bills. When was the last time you sent a donation to the ISC? Paul's very good at leveraging value in such a way that everybody benefits, but sometimes leverage means that you have to wait a few weeks to get the benefit that the people who are paying to generate the benefit get immediately. This is an unusually good deal in the real world - usually if you don't pay, you don't get the goods at all.
(I should say that I used to work for him, although I haven't for a couple of years, so it's not like I'm a disinterested bystander here.)
"perhaps a .gnu is in order for open source projects, for instance."
Every open source project gets a subdomain *.projects.gnu.org. Or *.opensource.org. Problem solved.
Our client has publicly stated that when it is completed this software will be released under the GPL. That includes server software supporting geographically separate database replicas, and a full client implementation including management functionality.
It would be interesting to see it used for the .org TLD - currently it is being developed for the .nz ccTLD, but the design is intended to allow for use in any other TLD.