What license?
I'm absolutely serious. If you can point me at a license for any piece of djbdns I'd appreciate the help. There is nothing I can find in the distribution or on the website.
There is indeed no license per se, not in the sense of the term that many have come to expect, anyway. The closest thing to it (and djb would argue, just as good) is the statement that the program can be used and modified freely, and can also be distributed freely as long as no modifications are made to it. Many observers take issue with the latter, and claim it violates the spirit if not the letter of the open source movement. They have a point, but I have also found djb's reasoning behind this stance to be much less sinister than his opponents like to claim.
BIND also has a terrible caching strategy, where is purges the most recent queries first, making the cache worthelss when it is full. I moved to djbdns for performance, and I have realized it in faster queries, and less problems under load.
I honestly am not familiar with that caching issue, although I am familiar with some of the debate between DJB and people he perceives as enemies and am not impressed with the truth level of that discourse. It seems to me that what I do know of the BIND caching strategy is that it honors TTL (which puts it ahead of most Windows systems) so it would never really reach a point where the cache really become stale no matter how it is managed I know that different people seem to get different performance results when trying to compare the way BIND and djbdns perform, and I'm not interested enough to try to figure out why.
DJB is opinionated, but that doesn't affect the quality of the software he writes.
That is only true if you append "in ways that most people care about." The use of DJB-ware pretty well eliminates any capacity to migrate to IPv6 as a direct result of Bernstein's childish and paranoid disagreements with the ways IPv6 standards ended up.
I'm no expert on this issue, but I know from list reading that users are using djbdns with IPv6, although the support is not complete. See http://www.fefe.de/dns/. To be fair, I think that implementing IPv6 in djbdns is not for the easily frightened. I've personally found that just IPv4 is not for the easily frightened either. As for IPv6, it is currently barely implemented, if at all, no? One way or the other, djbdns -will- support IPv6, or it will become extinct. For as much as djb absolutely hates BIND and the people that write it, he apparently had no problem writing axfrdns, a tool necessary for zone transfers in a BIND world.
DJB-ware does not qualify as 'Open Source' by the usual definitions. I have never been actually able to find a license (there is none in the djbdns package and none on the djbdns website) so it's rather hard to pass judgement on the license. DJB has made legal threats against people distributing modified versions of his software, so it is unclear where he draws the line on his ownership of it.
As an end-user, I have personally felt that djb-ware comes pretty close to the definition of open source. I can download it and use it for free, I have access to the source, I can modify the source to my heart's content, and can run publicly accessible name servers with the modified source. I can distribute djb's source in unmodified form, and if I so desire, I can include on the same distribution all my patches with instructions to people on how to modify djb's source. Nevertheless, it is true that it doesn't meet every commonly accepted open source criteria.
To be a participant on the djbdns list does take some balls. I am quite proud of the fact that I have never been flamed there. I frankly have no idea why not, despite having asked more than a few questions, and having never contributed much in the way of answers. A summary of the monthly list output usually does produce plenty of memorable quotes though. Regardless, the primary contributors on the list, although rather zealous in their defense of djbdns, seem an eminently practical lot, and would likely never allow "their" software to go down the tubes - they are too united in their hatred for BIND :-)
Stefan Jeglinski
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