Slashdot Mirror
Oracle Buys Dyn DNS Provider (techcrunch.com)
Oracle announced today it is buying DNS provider Dyn, a company that was in the press lately after it was hit by a large-scale DDoS attack in October that resulted in many popular websites becoming inaccessible. From a TechCrunch report:Oracle plans to add Dyn's DNS solution to its bigger cloud computing platform, which already sells/provides a variety of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) products. Oracle and Dyn didn't disclose the price of the deal but we are trying to find out. Dan Primack reports that it's around $600 million. We've also asked for a comment from Oracle about Dyn's recent breach, and whether the wheels were set in motion for this deal before or after the Mirai botnet attack in October.
So right after their value gets depressed?
Not suspicious at all...
I wish there were some solution to stop acquisitions like this: a small company with a decent product is consumed by some multinational giant. The product may live on for a few years, but ultimately it gets transmogrified into something unrecognizable and - as often as not - useless. But the multinational now has the patents needed to prevent competition.
Look at what Oracle is trying to do with Java: suing Google for using the fricking APIs. Microsoft is renowned for this as well: "extend, embrace, extinguish".
While I'm no fan of government regulation, I have the feeling that this is part-and-parcel of "too big to fail", and requires government intervention. Companies should not be allowed to grow beyond a certain size. If a company reaches that size, it must divest or split itself into smaller, independent entities.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
When I was hosting with Linode, they had an API call to update a DNS A record. As long as you requested a key from them, you could write a script on a local host to reach out to them and update the A record when the box or router would change addresses. Replicating that functionality if you need it should be fairly trivial.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
I think Dyn started out as a community effort rather than an explicit for-profit. I signed on back then. I seem to remember signing on for something long-term, for not much money. Not long after that they went commercial. My sign-on was supposed to be carried over to a year's service or something, I don't remember and I didn't pursue it because I was only interested in the community effort.
Bruce Perens.
Dyn grew by buying up small time DNS providers... a lot of them!
If I recall correctly, Slashdot had a few discussions about how large they were getting buying out other providers, and how bad it was to place so much trust in a single company.