September 23rd, 2009
BIND is not just legacy freeware
In pushing his SaaS DNS offering, Skye, general manager John Shalowitz has his marketing department partying like it’s 1999.
The open source BIND system that has held the Internet together for decades is “freeware,” he sniffs to ZDNet UK’s Toby Wolfe. “Freeware legacy DNS is the Internet’s dirty little secret.”
What’s wrong with that statement? Just about everything. Open source is not just freeware, calling something legacy just means it’s tested, and there has never been anything secret about BIND, dirty or otherwise.
Or as Yosemite Sam told Bugs Bunny in High Diving Hare, “Dem’s fightin’ woids.”
As to Skye, what can we say? We don’t know what’s in it. It’s proprietary. Shalowitz is basically using wordplay to say what proprietary vendors have told the market for ages. “Trust me.”
And when you’re talking about “cloud-based DNS,” you’re basically trusting someone to do a hosted version of every domain name lookup your company may want to do, now or in the future. You not only toss BIND, but all your internal DNS knowledge out the window, renting a service in which you will never get equity.
It all depends on how you look at it.
Skye comes from Nominum, which has been offering proprietary DNS software for years. Nominum knows its business, but it also knows that BIND is not a piece of garbage hacked together by a couple of college students in their dorm room. It’s a tested package with a long pedigree.
BIND is the reference implementation for the DNS protocols, and remains the most widely-used DNS software on the Internet. To call it “legacy”and “freeware” in pushing a proprietary alternative on mid-sized companies is just several steps beyond silly.
Of course the real question remains, will the pitch work?
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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