BIND Subscription

Internet Systems Consortium > BIND Subscription

Why pay for support for Open Source Software?

Advance Security Notification

All our BIND support subscriptions include early notification of critical security vulnerabilities, before the vulnerability is made public. After a vulnerability is reported and verified, we work around the clock on a solution. Then, we schedule a public announcement. As much as five days BEFORE the public announcement, (at least 3 business days) we notify our subscribers of the problem, individually and privately, and offer them a revised version of BIND that fixes the problem. This gives legitimate organizations that require a working Internet presence, adequate time to upgrade their systems before the vulnerability is publicly announced.

Technical Support

BIND Subscription beyond the Basic level also gives you access to support and bug fixes from the authors of BIND. In the absence of this support, you can always search the internet, or post questions on our popular mailing list, [email protected], or another public mailing list. If you subscribe, however, we can look at log files and other information from you, we will prioritize bugs that affect you, and you can get help efficiently and privately, without posting your company critical systems information on the Internet. In addition, we will review your configuration annually, if you desire, to help you identify potential problems and optimize your DNS.

Influence our Roadmap

We are much better able to serve those users with whom we have a technical support relationship, because we understand their needs better. Most of the time, we become aware of new requirements through the customer support process. While ISC is an open source company, and we fix all the serious bugs that are reported to us as soon as possible, we do prioritize the reasonable feature requests of subscribers who are supporting us, because we recognize, as all BIND users should, that the subscribers are supporting the on-going maintenance and development of BIND for everyone.

Subscriber-only releases

ISC’s SP releases provide a deployable, stable BIND version for our customers to have early support for new features in development. This gives you the ability to innovate and deploy leading-edge functionality with the full support of ISC. ISC will determine what base version to use for the SP edition, and will port the new features as needed to integrate them.

The software released in the SP edition is intended for eventual general public release but features in this version may be changed or even removed by the time of the public release. The SP edition releases are actively maintained and patched in case of security vulnerabilities.

Subscriber Benefits:

Professional Technical Support
Our team of technical support engineers will help you troubleshoot problems, escalate and track bug reports. Annually, if you choose, they will review your configuration and point out any concerns.
Priority Bug Fixes and Engineering Support
As an ISC support customer, you will receive prioritized bug fixes and patches to keep your business online.
Subscriber-only Software Edition
Subscribers have access to a special edition of the BIND software with new, added-value features. We will base these releases on a stable public BIND release, and add in features from our unreleased development branch. Your feedback on the new features will help shape our roadmap.
Advance Notification of Security Vulnerabilities
Receive up to 5 days advance notice before ISC publishes information on a BIND security vulnerability, with a patch. This gives you time to plan and schedule an update to your infrastructure, before any potential exploiters find out about the vulnerability.