[Pdns-users] PowerDNS & Open Source

[bert hubert]

Hi everyone,

First, apologies for boring you with a non-technical post. But I still think
it is important.

More than three years ago we announced that PowerDNS would be shipping non
open source software, also known as the PowerDNS Platform. We hoped that you
would understand. https://blog.powerdns.com/2016/02/23/an-important-update-on-new-powerdns-products/
I know that some of you must have worried this would lead to neglect of our
open source offerings.

Since that time, all our products have grown and improved, with dnsdist as a
specific example - it now powers vast amounts of nameservers, protecting
them against denial of service attacks & replacing costly hardware load
balancers.

In this new post, "How PowerDNS is Open Source & a successful business, or,
why are we talking about 5G?"
https://blog.powerdns.com/2019/05/07/how-powerdns-is-open-source-a-successful-business-or-why-are-we-talking-about-5g/
we explain what we are doing these days, and why we are suddenly writing
stuff about things like 5G DNS or 'DNS over HTTPs for telcos'.

One reason why you might care is that if you love open source, you may be
aware that it is not always easy to get large companies to actually run open
source. Expensive vendors however somehow are able to convince senior
management to run their stuff - even if it is worse.

One thing we have been able to do over the past few years is to also become
good at that game. We have very good people now that are able to convince
companies to run our software. This is why we talk about "5G DNS" - everyone
does, so we do so as well, but we've tried hard to tell a story that
actually makes sense, https://www.powerdns.com/5g.html - if you offer low
latency network access, please also make sure your nameserver is fast. 

Meanwhile, what I think many of you feared, we have also managed not to turn
into a horrible corporate company you can no longer talk to. We're still
there on our IRC channel and not going anywhere.

So again, apologies for perhaps boring you with this commercial stuff, but I
do think it is important for everyone to know what we have been up to, and
how we have been able to get our open source software deployed so much more
widely.

    Bert