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Paul Vixie to Leave BIND
strabo writes "Paul Vixie made it known at LISA '99 in Seattle on Wednesday that he'll be stepping down as the maintainer and head architect of BIND, which he has been doing for the past 10 years. Many thanks to Paul for his hard work and dedication!
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Vixie is of the well-considered opinion that the DNS tree can only have one root. DNS is designed around the idea that each zone, including the top-level zone, can only have a single authority record. This means that delegation can emanate only from one place, namely the top-level SOA (Start Of Authority) record.
Whoever controls the top-level SOA controls the delegation for the top-level domains (com, edu, de, jp, etc.) and hence the rest of the system. This was true when InterNIC was run not-for-profit, and remains true now that InterNIC is run for profit: it is not an artifact of the management of the DNS directory, but rather of its design.
It would be possible to create a new name-service system which permitted multiple roots, search engines or Hotline-style "trackers", a directed-graph model instead of a tree model, &c. However, this would not be DNS, and these features should not be slapped onto the side of DNS. They would require a new architecture.
If you want it, please feel free to design it. Distribute your resolver libraries far and wide. However, don't commit the errors of AlterNIC, such as committing computer crimes (forgery of DNS entries) in order to popularize your system.
> where's this BIND 9 that keeps getting talked about? the companies who funded it wanted early access. since the budget was $1.5M we gave on this point. when it's ready for public testing it will be up on some ftp server with a regular BSD/ISC license. > Second, who's going to take over BIND now? nobody. ISC took it over in 1994. i'm chairman of ISC but as bind8 is approaching end-of-life in favour of bind9, my involvement as an architect is sort of ending. i'm just a manager now. > Third, what's the -real- reason for the resignation? 10 years is a long time. DNS is very big now. i'm going to stay involved with ISC but not be "the" or even "a" BIND technologist in the future. once we (ISC) get bind9 out the door i may decide to contribute code fragments to it, but as an individual contributor rather than as any sort of author, coauthor, or architect.