PRE-ANNOUNCEMENT:BIND Members Forum

[Thomas Kellar]

Background:

I work as a contractor for a fortune 500 company managing their internal
and external (Intranet and Internet) DNS servers.  We have 2 on the
outside, on different subnets (:)) and 4 master servers and 4 slave
servers at remote sites on the inside, mainly in place so that DNS
requests do not go over our WAN links.  Currently, I am more or less the
only support person for this corporation though that works pretty well as
they do not require much maintenance and I have written web page scripts
to control them that allow non-technical persons to restart them, etc.

Foreground:

This company is a somewhat Microsoft centric organization and I have had a
lots of battles with the Microsoft Advocates who want Microsoft this and
Microsoft that.  They generally view Microsoft as the source of all
salvation.  (Though we do have lots of Mainframe activity and Netware
Activity.) I prefer to have BIND running on Solaris machines and generally
when I set one up from scratch, I install the latest BIND, PERL and Apache
for maintaining and controlling the computer.  (As well as gcc and gmake
for compiling.)

I am not sure what this PRE-ANNOUNCEMENT means in the long run but I am
not happy about it now.  It strikes me as something that Microsoft itself
would do.  It strikes me as something definitely non-opensource in its
aroma.  I am not clear about the words "Recent events have very clearly
shown there is a need for a fee-based membership forum...."  This is not
evident to me.  What events have shown?  How have events shown the need
for a fee-based membership?  Is this purely a money making method?  Is
this to keep the kiddy script creators out-presuming they could not afford
to belong?  Is this an attempt at security through obscurity?

Why should not I get "early warnings of security or other important
flaws."  Should only the privileged members get this?