Subject: Bind going commercial

From: Jeff Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 09 Jul 1998 03:35:38 +0100

All,

  Here is another intresting development.

See  http://www.sunworld.com/swol-07-1998/swol-07-bind.html?070898a

========== some excerpts below.

San Francisco (July 8, 1998) -- Pssst. Want to invest in an Internet start-up?

A little-known Silicon Valley company is looking for investors and, if it can
pull some
together, its prospectus would make for interesting reading. The company's
software
is useful and ubiquitous -- in fact, the Internet as we know it wouldn't work
without
it. It has close to 100 percent market penetration and a good distribution
channel --
all the major Unix vendors port it to their respective operating systems.

There's only one catch: The software is given away, and the company really
doesn't care about
making money.

Changes are afoot at the Internet Software Consortium (ISC) -- best known as the
people who
maintain the BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Daemon) implementation of the
Internet's Directory Naming Service (DNS). Long run as a kind of charity,
staffed with workers from Paul Vixie's consulting firm, Vixie Enterprises, and
living off of donations and sporadic contract work from operating system
vendors, the ISC has just hired a new executive director chartered with making
BIND development viable. And though Vixie is loathe to use the words "for
profit," he says it is "likely" that the ISC "will not continue to pursue 501(c)
[non-profit] status." In other words, the ISC is changing from a charity to a
Silicon Valley company.

The sendmail thing When Eric Allman formed Sendmail Inc. last March and
announced plans to sell enhancements to his ubiquitous freeware, called Sendmail
Pro, Paul Vixie saw that Allman's "hybrid" business model -- where services and
software additions to the basic sendmail package are sold to pay for development
of the free software -- could also apply to BIND. Both products are essential to
the Internet. Both have a dominant market presence. And both are cryptic to the
average user.

============end of excerpts

  Cant say I didn't tell you so!

Regards,

--
Jeffrey A. Williams
DIR. Internet Network Eng/SR. Java/CORBA Development Eng.
Information Network Eng. Group. INEG. INC.
E-Mail [email-masked]