18.4. About PowerDNS.COM BV, 'the company'

As of 25 November 2002, the PowerDNS nameserver and its modules are open source. This has led to a lot of questions on the future of both PowerDNS, the company and the products. This FAQ attempts to address these questions.

Q: Is PowerDNS 2.9 really open source? What license?

A: PowerDNS 2.9 is licensed under the GNU General Public License version two, the same license that covers the Linux kernel.

Q: Is the open source version crippled?

A: It is not. Not a single byte has been omitted.

Q: Is the nameserver abandoned?

A: Far from it. In fact, we expect development to speed up now that we have joined the open source community.

Q: Why is the nameserver now open source?

A: In the current economic climate and also the way the Internet is built up right now, selling software is very hard. Most potential customers had never before bought a piece of software for their UNIX internet setup. Even though we know (from the recent survey) that nameserver operators love PowerDNS, their suggested price for it is in the $100 range.

For us, it makes far more sense to open source PowerDNS than to ask $100 for it. It is expected that open sourcing PowerDNS will lead to far higher adoption rates. We hope that PowerDNS will soon be included in major Linux and UNIX distributions.

Q: How does PowerDNS.COM BV expect to make money now that the nameserver is free?

A: In fact, we don't expect to in the near future. We also don't have a lot of expenses, basically some hosting and a few domain names.

However, we are available for consulting work, for example to help a large registrar or registry migrate to PowerDNS, or to help integrate our software in existing provisioning systems.

Furthermore, non-GPL licenses are available for those needing to do closed source modifications, or for customers uncomfortable with the GPL. This is much like what MySQL AB is doing now.

In fact, their strategy is a lot like ours in general.

Q: Can I buy support contracts for PowerDNS?

Sure, to do so, please contact us at

Q: Will you accept patches? We've added a feature

Probably - in general, it is best to discuss your intentions and needs on the (subscribe) mailinglist before doing the work. We may have suggestions or guidelines on how you should implement the feature.

Q: PowerDNS doesn't work on my platform, will you port it?, Q: PowerDNS doesn't have feature I need, will you add it?

Be sure to ask on the (subscribe) mailinglist. You can even hire us to do work on PowerDNS if plain asking is not persuasive enough. This might be the case if we don't currently have time for your feature, but you need it quickly anyhow, and are not in a position to submit a patch implementing it.

Q: Will PowerDNS Express be open sourced?

Perhaps, we're not yet sure.

Q: We are a Linux/Unix vendor, can we include PowerDNS?

A: Please do. In fact, we'd be very happy to work with you to make this happen. Contact if you have specific upstream needs.