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BIND 9.3 Released With Commercial Support
darthcamaro writes "Time for net admins to update BIND: version 9.3 has been released. internetnews.com has a story on it where they talk with Paul Vixie, the founder of BIND's keeper ISC. In it he details why after so many years BIND has finally decided to offer commercial support. 'Many of the companies who use our software free of charge have told us that their corporate risk management strategy requires them to have a bona fide support channel for all of their critical operations,' Vixie said. 'In other words we were told that having the best software wasn't good enough, and giving it away for free wasn't good enough, we also had to ensure that commercial support was available or they could be forced to switch to software they didn't like as well just to get support.' The full press release on the BIND 9.3 release is also available."
No support, no sale.
I can understand it to a degree; there's no guarantee that the version installed today will not be completely dropped next month. It gets a little aggravating when it holds up an entire project, though, because of one small piece.
The upside, of course, is more funding for critical projects.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Hopefully the ISC won't turn this into a RedHat situation.. They find that corporate use is profitable, and release a closed-only solution to corporations, while forking the code over to another open source project..
Just when you make it idiotproof, some idiot builds a better idiot.
If you are running any kind of critical operation, support has to be guaranteed. And in our capitalist world, that means paying for it. No matter how good it is, free software has no guarantees whatsoever. And companies need those guarantees. Simply because in court a 'we'll do our best to support our l33t software' is just not good enough
Not specifically the BIND folks, but it's good to see that people are more and more waking up to this fact. Hopefully the fact that something is 'open source' and people are 'making money' from it won't be a newsworthy item in the near future.
What I think many programmers don't understand is that most people will often choose a so-so product from a well-run business over a better product from a poorly run business or organization. Having no guaranteed support mechanism for BIND (and other projects) does hurt adoption of those projects in many organizations. Option support is essentially the best of both worlds, as long as the prices aren't cost prohibitive. If pricing is too high, there's much less incentive to switch, because people will usually settle for 'good enough' when 'way better' costs a whole lot more.
creation science book
Hopefully that wasn't in reference to Bind. I know a few people who might take issue with that...
We bought support. The god-like powers of software vendors are obviously much superior to those of anyone that would work for us, even if the source code is open. </PHB>
Then come back and start telling us about the guarantees that you get. Oh, and have a look at your support contracts as well to see exactly you are guaranteed.
I think you'll find they amount to little more than "we'll do our best to support our l33t software".
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
...in way. At least it keeps the crappy proprietary DNS products from infiltrating the net to an extent. Since the asshat suits who think it's better to have commercial support for something are wailing about thi issue, at least it's addressed now. They can go sit and spin.
Un-news
This doesn't so much look like a disadvantage for free software, as it looks like a really easy and cushy business opportunity for some laid-off programmers and sysadmins. Some company wants BIND with support? Then be the guy who sells BIND to them. Get paid $n/month to do almost nothing. Compete with Paul Vixie, selling his own software.
It looks like Paul's problem, is that nobody else wanted the money, so he was forced into taking it himself. Life's a bitch.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
In other words we were told that having the best software wasn't good enough [...]
That works out well, because BIND isn't anywhere near the best software, at least not for name serving. It is, however, an exceedingly reliable source of serious vulnerabilities, and considering how relatively simple DNS is, that's a monumental achievement in its own right.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Isn't this why companies will pay so much money for IT that know what their doing. If your paying for the best of the best, support should not be a high priority. If you have to use lower quality products just for support, then someone in the chain of command shouldn't have a job.
TruePunk | Games
Or how about when you go around to a new colleages house for a BBQ, to get to know them. Do you eat the free food there ?
Or go to a party where everybody has to bring food or drinks. Do you eat the free food there ? Would you be offended if other people don't eat the free food that you brought ? If they don't, aren't they saying that you are untrustworthy ?
Free doesn't mean you can't trust something.
You are overlooking social and reputational consequences of providing something at no cost that has intrinsic value. I know you know about this idea, as you posted your own example earlier. In your case, it was software you paid money for. You still threaten social and reputational consequences if the product fails, which for a commercial company has financial consquences. For people who provide software for free, social and reputational consequences are far more costly, as the only increase in value they get from providing the software for free are social and reputational.
In fact, this is one of the fundamental truths of The Cluetrain Manifesto. The Internet provides the ability for social and reputational consquences to travel much further and much faster, which increase the impact of those consequences.
I'm sure if BIND wasn't good enough, the readership of Slashdot would know about it pretty quickly. We already know when an exploitable bug is discovered, the day it is discovered. That is likely to be one of the major origins of negative comments about BIND in Slashdot forums. The Slashdot community is a large technical community, who usually are in positions to select one DNS server implementation over another.
If ISC care about their social position within the Internet community (I'm sure they do), and want to avoid reputational consquences when they can't be relied upon (I'm sure they do), they can either try to out market the negative messages, or try to do the right job. It is almost a sport for techos to spot marketroids, so I'm confident they will try to do the right job.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
I run Bind. I run Sendmail. I'll always use both. I supplement Bind with rbldnsd. I have no need to supplement Sendmail. Both do what I want. Since I'm not an incompotent moron I don't have any trouble configuring either of them. The claims people make about both/either being difficult to admin or insecure are complete bullshit. If the person was a half-assed compotent admin neither would be a problem. I swear, what is the world coming to....
It's not clear why people continue to use BIND.
I continue to use BIND because I don't like DJB's licence.
Vs lbh pna ernq guvf, ybt bss abj. Tb bhgfvqr. Syl n xvgr.
What you're selling is your phone number. RTFM doesn't do the customer any good if the customer doesn't know what a FM is, or even WHICH FM to R. Even if most of the customers can do it all themselves, it's nice to have that phone number in case of emergencies.
I think if open-source software is to gain popularity (particularly in the enterprise environment), they must all provide corporate support.
Regardless of what you think, corporations are all about minimizing risk and shifting blame onto someone else. Having a support contract is almost a minimum at many large corporations. If there is a problem, management would like to have the confidence that some specialist outside the organization will be helping--or more likely, blamed for the problems. It is much easier for management to blame another company than themselves. Which seems more easy to defend:
"hmm... my team is working as much as they can on it. It'll be resolved soon"
OR
"The problem is being dealt with. Our vendor (insert name; say Novell) is providing a resolution."
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
Exactly... they didn't need a competent sysadmin, they just had to do without until the cavalry arrived. That way, the IT department doesn't actually have to learn a whole lot about computers, they can just be glorified hardware techies that hire their buddies for good jobs, and pay vendors out the nose for tools and services they should be able to script or figure out themselves.
As such you can't make changes and distribute them as part of a integrated set (in theory you could distribute just the patches but it's a grey area). Hence many people consider it "un-free". Some people see this as a problem.
The policy of the United States is worse than bad---it is insane. -- Ludwig von Mises, Economic Policy(1959)