Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Yes, open source is a win-win

Open source is a win-win.

I am very pleased to let the MaraDNS community know that I have successfully gotten a job offer which I just accepted this week. This is a job offer which I would not have gotten if I had not kept my skills current while living in Mexico by continuing to develop MaraDNS, culminating with a three-year-long complete rewrite of the recursive code.

The timing for getting this offer is perfect. As I planned to do a year ago, now that MaraDNS 2.0 is out the door, I will put MaraDNS on the back burner. This will give me more time to be a productive worker at my new job and refine my programming knowledge to master new technologies, keeping my skills current in the 2010s.

I am going to continue to support MaraDNS, of course. I will fix important bugs brought up on the mailing list, and will naturally fix any critical security bug that may be found in MaraDNS. I will also answer emails on the mailing list when and if I have time to do so. But, I do not have any plans to add new features to MaraDNS at this time.

I would like to thank all MaraDNS users for all of your comments, feedback, bug reports, and feature requests. I have devoted a lot of the last decade to MaraDNS, and it has been an honor to freely give to the world something which I hope people find useful.

Open source development truly pays off. It’s a win for users, since they have good code which they can change any way they see fit; it’s a win for developers, because it allows them to showcase their work and demonstrate their programming discipline to prospective employers. I encourage people who are looking to improve their programming skills to become part of an open-source project. It can be frustrating at times; but it is also rewarding.