MaraDNS 1.4.04 released

[Sam Trenholme]

> Hi Sam, I've a question, half private, half public.
> If you were Bill Gates, what would be the price
> of MaraDNS? Forget for a moment it's free,
> how many bucks should I pay?

If I were Bill Gates....hmmm.  OK $50 for the MaraDNS + Deadwood,
which includes unlimited zones and one email support incident.  Beta
testers, of course, get a free copy of Deadwood (but only support on
online forums and no, there are no developers on said forums), but the
copy expires in six months.

I’m not Bill Gates, however.  So, yes, the full copy of Deadwood +
MaraDNS is free to download, use, modify (Source code licenses for
commercial programs easily cost thousands of dollars), and you even
get free support from the author if you can figure out how to
subscribe to a mailing list and post here [1].

It’s a commercial product because I charge people to implement
features—me implementing something that doesn’t satisfy my itch
doesn’t benefits the users of said feature more than me. I also charge
people if they want something besides a form email about how I can use
a job or money when they ask a question via private email.  That’s
because answering questions via private email only benefits the person
I’m answering the question for, and no one else, so if someone wants
to benefit only themselves without helping the community, I will ask
to get some benefit from it too.

I feel the same way about NXDOMAIN redirects (web pages some DNS
servers send you to if someone mistypes a hostname accidentally and no
typo-squatter has grabbed the mistype in question): They only benefit
the person who charges for ad space on the NXDOMAIN redirect webpage
and the advertisers on said webpage.  If someone wants me to implement
a feature that only benefits parties involved with said ad page, I
better get some of that benefit myself.

Back on topic, I just released a new Deadwood snapshot today.  This
has a tweak which has been bouncing around my head for a few days that
minimizes SERVER FAIL replies sent by Deadwood in the process of
resolving a difficult name like Avira.com (see, I was able to get the
original topic in there).

It can be looked at here:

http://maradns.org/deadwood/snap/deadwood-H-20100803-1.tar.bz2

- Sam

[1] I spell out the entire process at http://www.maradns.org/faq.html#subscribe