What is ISC?

Teaser

ISC - The Portal to a Better Internet

History of ISC

Leadership

Board of Directors

ISC - The Portal to a Better Internet

Internet Systems Consortium, Inc. (ISC) is a non-profit 501(c)(3) public benefit corporation dedicated to supporting the infrastructure of the universal connected self-organizing Internet - and the autonomy of its participants - by developing and maintaining core production quality software, protocols, and operations.

ISC is proud to be the producer and distributor of commercial quality Open Source software for the Internet Community and to offer world-class online and professional services based on our software. Since 1996 ISC has led the industry with the most complete reference standard implementation of DNS (BIND) software using a Managed Open Source model. ISC also provides production-quality reference implementations for other core protocols such as DHCP, and distributes other open source software.

All of our open source software is available for free download from our website, since it is free, the Software Forum is a membership program for users and integrators of ISC's software or sponsored projects. ISC depends on annual membership fees to provide funding for ongoing software maintenance, enhancement and publication. Here's our OpenPGP Key information.

ISC also provides a number of Operational Programs and Services that benefit users of the Internet directly and indirectly. Since 1994, ISC has operated F-Root (one of the 13 root DNS servers) as a public service to the Internet.

History

ISC was originally founded in 1994 as Internet Software Consortium, Inc., to continue the work of maintaining and enhancing BIND following in the footsteps of CSRG at U.C. Berkeley, Digital Equipment Corp., and Vixie Enterprises. BIND was then (and is now) an essential component of the Internet's infrastructure, and ISC's founders (Paul Vixie, Carl Malamud, and Rick Adams) felt very strongly that BIND's continued support and enhancement should be managed and funded by an independent entity. Want to see a fun animation about DNS? - click here. IANA (Jon Postel, 1943-1998) designated ISC as a root name server operator (first NS.ISC.ORG, then F.ROOT-SERVERS.NET) so that we could properly support the use of BIND by root name servers.

Over the years a number of additional software systems have either found refuge at ISC (INN, Lynx) or were created by ISC (DHCP, OpenReg) to better support the Internet's infrastructure. We have also expanded our operational activities beyond root name service, to include Internet hosting facilities for other open source projects (NetBSD, XFree86, kernel.org), secondary name service for more than 50 top-level domains, and a DNS OARC (Operations, Analysis and Research Center) for monitoring and reporting of the Internet's Domain Name System.

Originally launched by a grant from UUNET Technologies, ISC's current funding is from Software Guild members, F-Root mirror sponsors, grants from foundations including the US National Science Foundation, support contracts, development contracts, and donations.

In 2004 ISC changed our name to Internet Systems Consortium, Inc. We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit incorporated in the state of Delaware, with employees in Brittany, California, Georgia (US), Madrid, Massachusetts, New South Wales, North Carolina, North Holland, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Paris, Tennessee, and Texas. We have a global constituency.

Leadership

President	Office is currently being served by Keith Mitchell, Joao Damas and Laura Hendriksen
Chairman & Chief Scientist	Paul Vixie - Checkout Vixie's Blog
Vice President of Systems Engineering	Keith Mitchell
Vice President of Software Engineering	Joao Damas
Vice President of Business Development	Laura Hendriksen
Director of Finance	Alyson Towry
Director of Operations	Jim Martin
Director of Services	Francisco Obispo