[HN Gopher] The Internet runs on free and open source software a...
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The Internet runs on free and open source software and so does the
DNS
Report: _The Domain Name System Runs on Free and Open Source
Software (FOSS) [pdf]_ https://itp.cdn.icann.org/en/files/security-
and-stability-ad...
Author : ChrisArchitect
Score : 256 points
Date : 2025-10-29 18:16 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.icann.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.icann.org)
| jongjong wrote:
| But the infrastructure is highly centralized and only certain
| chosen entities can operate gTLDs and certificate authorities.
| It's extremely misleading to call it 'free software'. Why can't
| there be multiple competing systems. There should be a push for
| Blockchain-based alternatives. I still don't understand why
| projects like Unstoppable Domains aren't getting more traction.
| The idea of a domain name that you actually own is appealing.
| lelandbatey wrote:
| I think you may be applying a very weird definition of "free
| software", even compared to the usual gratis vs libre axis.
|
| Also, I really don't think controlling a domain name NFT in a
| system that's mostly computers you neither own nor control
| constitutes "more ownership" than the IRL law and contract
| bound rental world we currently live in. Especially if all the
| requirements and outcomes (payments for control resulting in
| land grabs of valuable names) are the same as our current
| system.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Maybe not more ownership by the owner, but certainly more
| ownership by the _user,_ which is what 's important. If there
| are multiple blockchain-based alternatives, I can choose
| which one to resolve with; it's also essentially built-in
| namespacing (with each name marked with its resolver.) And
| although I'm personally very crypto-negative, a distributed
| ledger is exactly what I would want to make sure that any
| nodes that I use to resolve a name on a particular registry
| are trustworthy.
|
| The throughput problem that poisons cryptocurrency becomes
| irrelevant when we're talking about something that's as
| naturally long-lived as domain names. Every domain blockchain
| can have its own gatekeeping process; one can sell names for
| thousands of $ each, and another can give away thousands for
| a $. They can require that domain owners have a camera
| pointed at them personally for 24-hours a day or be revoked,
| or they can hand out infinite names through a onion-routed
| API.
| denkmoon wrote:
| There can be and are multiple competing systems. There are
| alternative dns roots, opennic.org for example, and entirely
| separate protocols like ipfs and i2p with their own methods of
| mapping names to numbers.
|
| You can go make your entire own alternative DNS system, with
| your own governance and policy. Free as you like. You just have
| to convince people to resolve against you.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| I think that permanent identifiers might be helpful, which
| could include a timestamp and other stuff. This can be combined
| with web of trust, that it can then be verified in this way.
| renewiltord wrote:
| They just run one root. You can run a different root. E.g. Some
| people run an ENS bridge.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >In the cloud, hyperscale computing platforms such as Microsoft
| Azure, Google Cloud, and Amazon Web Services all operate
| significant resolver infrastructure to support their services. At
| least four of the biggest hyperscalers rely on FOSS for DNS
| resolving, while others have built proprietary solutions based on
| FOSS DNS libraries.
|
| This is surprising. I would have expected them to have custom
| needs with so many customers that using an off the shelf service
| would be sufficient.
| lofties wrote:
| It's all cURL.
| giantrobot wrote:
| It's cURL, SQLite, and one weird awk script no one
| understands but works so no one touches it.
|
| https://xkcd.com/2347/
| mumber_typhoon wrote:
| Imagine a scenario where you want to start gardening. Go to
| gardening clubs and you'll find a lot of free information there
| and people to guide you. Public libraries exist if you want to
| join a book club and start reading. Again free. Agriculture,
| irrigation, building homes, woodworking, stitching clothes, etc.
| everything essential has been free to learn and do.
|
| Apply this to the internet and essentials are FOSS. Linux, DNS
| and maybe RISCV someday will mean you can build computers and
| internet on essentials that are free to learn and use.
| staplers wrote:
| Raspberry Pi's obviously trying to make this a reality.
|
| Learning to self-host and get off cloud services might be one
| of the most personally freeing feelings I've had in a long
| time.
|
| Rent-seeking is obviously growing out of control and one of the
| most powerful ways to combat it is personal ownership (if
| possible).
| cobertos wrote:
| In the same analogy, doesn't that mean that vendor-locked
| software like iOS or ChromeOS would be akin to vendor-locked
| seeds from Monsanto?
| mrarjen wrote:
| Bayer these days and yes, avoid like the plague for nothing
| good will come of it.
| throw844958585i wrote:
| Land for garden in my town costs like 1000 eur per square
| meter. Gardening clubs are full of old dudes, who want to have
| a sex with me. Public libraries are homeless shelters now. If I
| actually plant some vegetables (in pots or front yard), it will
| be full of dog/cat excrements the next day!
|
| You are living in imaginary land, nothing is free in todays
| society!
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Just because you live in some shitty, doesn't mean everyone
| has to or wants to be...
|
| (I do realise you used euro, I just don't think we need to
| adjust our standards down, when our locality sucks.)
| seydor wrote:
| We should tax cloudflare, aws etc. for using public
| infrastructure
| renewiltord wrote:
| We do tax them, my dude.
| tellarin wrote:
| Just maybe not enough.
| LeonM wrote:
| I don't understand your sentiment against Cloudflare here.
|
| Cloudflare also delivers a rather large portion of said public
| infrastructure free of charge. They also released a few of
| their own projects as FOSS, and regularly contribute.
|
| Granted, the centralisation part worries me too, but it feels
| like a bit of a cheap shot against CF just because they are a
| large player.
| neom wrote:
| And don't forget about this awesome report, Roads and Bridges:
| The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure - by Nadia
| Asparouhova.
| https://www.fordfoundation.org/learning/library/research-rep... -
| great research into what goes into OSS.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Too often unpaid too. Certainly taken for granted and exploited
| by the corporations. We should have more copyleft than
| permissive software.
|
| https://zedshaw.com/blog/2022-02-05-the-beggar-barons/
| evertedsphere wrote:
| Perhaps it doesn't even matter anymore, but I'm not yet past the
| point where it's disheartening every time I click on a link and
| it's clear that it came out of an LLM. Hopefully this doesn't
| extend to the actual report.
| hliyan wrote:
| It's interesting that there is a generation of developers now who
| seem to believe that the Internet is an achievement of pure
| commercial, market dynamics and are surprised to learn about
| ARPANET and its early development within academia (we were taught
| this history in the first year of university). If the foundations
| of the Internet (particularly the protocol suites) had not been
| open, government-funded and not-for-profit, we would probably
| have a number of competing closed platforms instead of a single
| Internet, with paid services to perform protocol translations
| between them.
| n3storm wrote:
| So true. I find another prove that altruist collaboration wins
| any other model although users may not perceived as such or
| there is no interest spreading these facts.
| cousin_it wrote:
| Altruist? DARPA is a military agency, ARPANET was a prototype
| network designed to survive a nuclear strike. I think the
| grandparent comment's point is that the innovation was
| government-funded and made available openly; none of which
| depends on the slightest on its being altruist.
| tremon wrote:
| The resilience of ARPANET was influenced by CYCLADES, which
| was developed in French Academia:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CYCLADES
|
| > The CYCLADES network was the first to make the hosts
| responsible for the reliable delivery of data, rather than
| this being a centralized service of the network itself.
| Datagrams were exchanged on the network using transport
| protocols that do not guarantee reliable delivery, but only
| attempt best-effort [..] The experience with these concepts
| led to the design of key features of the Internet Protocol
| in the ARPANET project
|
| Keeping with the theme of the thread, CYCLADES was
| destroyed because of greed:
|
| > Data transmission was a state monopoly in France at the
| time, and IRIA needed a special dispensation to run the
| CYCLADES network. The PTT did not agree to funding by the
| government of a competitor to their Transpac network, and
| insisted that the permission and funding be rescinded. By
| 1981, Cyclades was forced to shut down.
| msla wrote:
| https://siliconfolklore.com/internet-history/
|
| > Rumors had persisted for years that the ARPANET had been
| built to protect national security in the face of a nuclear
| attack. It was a myth that had gone unchallenged long
| enough to become widely accepted as fact.
|
| No, the Internet (inclusive of ARPANET, NSFNet, and so on)
| was not designed to survive a nuclear war. It's the worst
| kind of myth: One you can cite legitimate sources for,
| because it's been repeated long enough even semi-experts
| believe it.
|
| The ARPANET was made to help researchers and to justify the
| cost of a mainframe computer:
|
| > It's understandable how it could spread. Military
| communications during Nuclear War makes a more memorable
| story than designing a way to remote access what would
| become the first massively parallel computer, the ILLIAC
| IV. The funding and motivation for building ARPANET was
| partially to get this computer, once built, to be "online"
| in order to justify the cost of building it. This way more
| scientists could use the expensive machine.
| cousin_it wrote:
| That's a valiant attempt at myth-fighting, but it doesn't
| fully convince me. For example, one hop to Wikipedia
| gives this:
|
| > _Later, in the 1970s, ARPA did emphasize the goal of
| "command and control". According to Stephen J. Lukasik,
| who was deputy director (1967-1970) and Director of DARPA
| (1970-1975):_
|
| > _" The goal was to exploit new computer technologies to
| meet the needs of military command and control against
| nuclear threats, achieve survivable control of US nuclear
| forces, and improve military tactical and management
| decision making."_
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| Any technology that is developed to be federated and
| resilient in the face of apocalyptic events is
| definitionaly altruistic toward humanity.
| pmontra wrote:
| We would have had telcos (or satellite TVs) creating and
| competing on siloed services and eventually some big company
| would buy a telco to have access to their customers. Some
| multinational telcos would provide the same services around the
| world but most countries would have a wall at the border.
| foobarian wrote:
| The thing is, we did have telcos and others provide siloed
| services. AOL being the big one, but also things like
| Prodigy, Compuserve, French Minitel, etc. What I wonder about
| is, would an Internet-like system have arisen anyway just
| because it's such a better ux? You saw a development like
| that with Fidonet for example but I think the Internet stole
| its oxygen.
| pmontra wrote:
| We did have that well into Internet years because some
| services where not there yet. I give you an example: I
| worked for one of the early 3G providers (2003-). YouTube
| is from 2005. We developed and run streaming video services
| because our customers did not have any meaningful source of
| videos to watch, so we had to build that and other services
| to drive the sales of our phone contracts. Mobile web sites
| were not a thing for a few more years so we had news and
| meteo and many other things. Our little private internet.
| Then YouTube became big, other services were born and
| became big too, all phone companies basically became
| internet providers.
|
| Without IP protocols we probably would not even be born as
| a company. BBSes on analog modems or GSM data would be all
| we had.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Minitel was offered by France Telecom, then a government-
| operated service, under what was originally the Ministry of
| Postes, Telegraphes et Telephones. (The name "Minitel" is
| _not_ short for "ministry of telecommunications", but
| rather _Medium interactif par numerisation d 'information
| telephonique_. Though I suspect some advantageous ambiguity
| was exploited.
|
| France Telecom was privatised during the 1990s with the
| aquisition of the Orange Group, its current (commercial)
| branding.
| no_wizard wrote:
| Even among the open protocols there was healthy competition
| like Gopher and BBS networks
|
| It was truly a time to be alive, the 1980s and 1990s, if you
| were into technology. The change was interesting and quite
| rapid, lot of variety and experiments
| giantrobot wrote:
| > we would probably have a number of competing closed platforms
| instead of a single Internet, with paid services to perform
| protocol translations between them.
|
| That _did_ exist with the likes of Tymnet and the various
| Online Services (AOL, CompuServe, etc). The Internet won out
| over those because it was open, as you alluded to. Internet
| adoption really exploded with unlimited services rather than
| ISPs that billed hourly.
| mhurron wrote:
| Not really surprising when you have political parties and large
| tech companies both either outright minimizing the role public
| institutions had in developing anything or outright lying that
| the public sector can't possibly do anything at all.
| Sophira wrote:
| Yep, services like AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy and so on, would
| absolutely be separate. As it was, each of these services
| basically had to allow access to the greater Internet.
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| Open source and hacker culture is basically a massive ethical
| triumph that has catapulted humanity forward.
|
| There isn't a single person living on the planet that isn't
| touched and benefitted by this in some way, even remote island
| tribes we consider untouched, there is hardly a single ounce of
| space payload that doesn't have open source in it's causal
| chain.
|
| There is no more pragmatically altruistic culture that has ever
| existed or impacted more people.
|
| In the U.S. no culture has helped lift the impoverished out of
| poverty into the upper middle class through empowerment (ask
| any of us adults who were once kids going to bed hungry.)
|
| People have their pet beliefs and metaphysics and ideological
| communities but "information deserves to be free" is the goat.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > There isn't a single person living on the planet that isn't
| touched and benefitted by this in some way, even remote
| island tribes we consider untouched...
|
| That seems a bit over the top. I'd love to see your causal
| chain for that claim.
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| The Sentinelese monitoring program run by the government in
| India the works to enforce no contact rules relies on open
| source in it's causal chain.
|
| My mother did remote tribal work in the brasilian interior,
| she grew up on the Amazon, I personally know well off Ruby
| devs who grew up unable to even read.
|
| Whether you are against intervention or pro intervention,
| all across that spectrum, whatever your luxury belief may
| be, everyone is impacted by open-source.
|
| Open source is an insane force multiplier, not just for
| production but for the entire training and r&d pipeline as
| well.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Thanks for pointing this out. We're so surrounded by the
| dystopian tech future, it's nice to see some positivity to
| tech, it's been a while.
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| The protocols were made open by necessity, not by design. The
| motive was to connect academic , government, and commercial
| institutions across the country, all of which operated on
| incompatible operating systems and data networks. However, the
| common man would not have benefited from this before 1993, as
| the government effectively operated as a semi-competent
| firewall against commercial content and the broader public.
| They even sued ISPs that permitted legitimate accounts from
| remotely accessing the net through PPP or SLIP protocols. Not
| even commercial news feeds were permitted until the late 80s.
|
| The only Internet the common man interacted with is the one
| that began to flourish as the government relinquished control.
| The Internet since the mid-90s is and has been a purely
| commercial achievement.
| icedchai wrote:
| There were some early ISPs, like The World (Boston), that had
| IP access around 1991 or so. I believe they were connected
| through UUNet. I don't know if they were routeable on the
| NSFNet? "Commercial" traffic was supposedly prohibited.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| I remember a few BBSs that offered email (done via nightly
| UUCP so slower than people today are used to) to the common
| person.
|
| Because it was new there weren't really thought out mechanism
| for people connecting early on, but some did.
|
| http://www.armory.com/~spcecdt/deepthought.html
| icedchai wrote:
| I had a UUCP feed, by either late 1992 or early '93.
| Several other local BBSes had one, as well.
| LeonM wrote:
| For what I remember, most of the DNS root servers used to run
| Bind9 exclusively. I'm glad to see that this is now more diverse
| with NSD and Knot also being used (see table 4 in the report).
|
| Nothing against Bind9, but it is almost exclusively maintained by
| the ISC, so the DNS's future used to depend heavily on the ISC
| getting the funding needed to continue operating.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Not to mention how much better it is for
| standards/protocols/standarization to have multiple
| implementations of the same protocol in real-world usage so we
| can nail down the protocol in all situations. Bind9 almost
| ended up being "DNS" itself, which would have been bad overall,
| and instead we're seeing more diversity which means we'll be
| able to make better use of the specifications.
| akvadrako wrote:
| That hasn't been true for at least 15 years. I was a k-root DNS
| operator then, and we ran several software stacks on each
| cluster in case one had a bug.
| whitehexagon wrote:
| I was wondering what it would take to fork the internet. Or more
| seriously, what it would take to create an open source / hardware
| alternative. Maybe something true to it's routes of academia, ie
| no commercial activity permitted, especially adverts! Maybe even
| limited to some of the original simple protocols like HTTP, FTP
| and maybe RSS?
|
| When I was in Holland many years ago there was a university
| initiative to connect the whole town with it's own hobby network.
| I bought some directed antennae to connect, and it worked, but I
| seem to recall it was line-of-sight WiFi stuff and thus very
| limited range.
|
| I also worked for an airline that had line-of-sight laser
| communications, but again it was only short distances.
|
| Are there any modern alternatives that would make such a people
| sponsored/focused hobby network possible?
|
| The first thought I had was long-wave radio, but I cant imagine
| there is much bandwidth there, but might be okay for a text only
| protocols?
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