[rescue] Alternatives to BIND?

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On , December 8, 2001 at 18:04:14 (-0800), Gregory Leblanc wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [rescue] Alternatives to BIND?
>
> Maybe not, but if there's no activity, then who cares if it's officially
> abandoned or not?

You do (that's a "royal you", i.e. for some value of "you", a being
interested in using free software and in particular in need of something
to do what the software in question claims to do).

One of the primary reasons for using free software in the first place is
that you're not beholden to the author (or other maintainers).  You get
free software in its "pure" form, unencumbered (i.e. source code), and
that means you can do whatever you need to do with it to make it useful
for your purposes.

Free software is not "product".  It has no idea what "market share" is.
Once it has been written it just simply is, it simply exists, and it
will continue to exist forever more no matter what happens to its author
or caretakers, or even to its other users.

You don't care about the non-existant "market share" of free software
because you get it in its pure source form -- it doesn't need market
share to be viable or supportable.  It's irrelevent whether you have the
skills to support it yourself or not so long as you have the means to
employ those who do, and there's no real shortage of those with the
requisite skills.  If you don't think you are able to support your own
use of free software then I recommend you go only with proprietary
software.

Yes there are economies of scale when more people use some given piece
of free software, and when more programmers understand its internals,
but these are relativley insignificant savings (unlike what happens with
proprietary software).  Even if some never heard of before software is
freely released and the next day its author is run over by a bus and
parts this dreary world forever, there are any number of free software
enthusiasts out there who will help debug and support it if for no other
reason than the challenge such a task presents (and that's even if no
one of them takes it under their wing and explicitly maintains it and
produces new releases).  In other words it's even possible to get
essentially free support for abandoned, but free, software!

You use a piece of free software if it does what you want it to do and
because you have the source code for it, and for no other reasons (well,
OK, maybe if there's no other better[*] free alternative available...).
	[*] "better" here means better at satisfying your requirements.

The only reason you ever care if a freeware project has "activity" or
not is when you've heard tell there's some new feature or bug fix in the
works you've been aching to get your hands on, and you don't currently
have the resources to implement it yourself (and/or you don't want to
waste those resources when you might not do as good a job as the author
is apparently doing in parallel or some such).

Any free software is alive and well so long as it has even one sole user
left using it anywhere.  Note I said nothing about the author/maintainer.

> Just that lack in and of itself, perhaps not.  But any other, uhm,
> discrepancy, coupled with that, is.  I certainly think that ignoring the
> software packages that Bill was looking at was a good idea.

What kind of "discrepancy" could you possibly be thinking of?  Either
you're talking sillyness, or you're talking about Bill's real-world
requirements vs. the capabilities of the pacakge(s) in question.  Adding
politics of any kind, emotions, or other mumbo-jumbo to the equation is
a waste of time and effort and doesn't solve Bill's real-world problems
any better.

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;  <gwoods at acm.org>;  <g.a.woods at ieee.org>;  <woods at robohack.ca>
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