“On the verge of releasing a complete rewrite of the DNS
software BIND, and on the heels of MS Hotmail’s about-face
subscription to his spam-busting MAPS Realtime Blackhole List, Paul
Vixie made it known at LISA ’99 on Wednesday that he’ll be stepping
down from his pivotal role as BIND’s head architect and principal
maintainer.”
“Often mistakenly identified as BIND’s original author,
Vixie is in fact the person who took it to the next level, laying
the foundation for a new economy along the way. “The reason I
got started working on BIND is that it didn’t work,” he said
Wednesday. “So I started hacking the code, people found out I was
hacking the code and asked for copies, and the rest is
history.”
“It was in the course of describing how the completely rewritten
BIND 9 came about that Vixie mentioned his plan to pass on the
mantle. “I’m coming up on ten years working with BIND, and now that
the fresh, clean, from-scratch implementation has none of my code
in it, I’m pretty much planning to retire from BIND. Ten years is a
long time.”