It's old than Knot, NSD, Unbound and the current iteration of Bind (not sure how much they rewrote for Bind 10, but it's a lot I believe.)

Your information may simply be out of date, but: There is no ”BIND 10”. There was an aborted attempt some years ago with that name, but the current BIND is BIND 9, and there is, IFAIK, no plans for a BIND 10.

Eh, no? BIND 10 was under active development for years before ISC ran out of money. The continued work on BIND 9 is only happening thanks to numerous sponsors and large organizations with maintenance contracts.

You can download BIND 10 release 1.2 here: https://downloads.isc.org/isc/bind10/latest/

That latest release of that “BIND 10” is nine years old. The way I heard it, “BIND 10” was created at a time when BIND 9 development had stagnated, and BIND 10 was one of those “let’s rewrite it all” projects that you should never do¹. Consequently, it was a boondoggle, and was relatively quickly abandoned in favor of restarting BIND 9 development, which has continued very nicely ever since.

There was indeed something called “BIND 10”. There is no BIND 10.

1. <https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...>

Semantics I guess. By your logic the Dodge Viper never existed because it was discontinued.

ISC was heavily invested in BIND 10, to the point I even got a sticker. That combined with a 1.x release are what make a software project production ready.

I'm sure everyone remembers history differently, but had ISC not gone into cost cutting mode Shane wouldn't have been laid off and we'd all be arguing over what BIND 10 alternative is best. :)

> By your logic the Dodge Viper never existed because it was discontinued.

It existed, and even still exists, since people still buy and drive it. But nobody would use that “BIND 10” release today.

This is because software is different from cars, in that you need to use an up-to-date version. You therefore depend on there being a current development branch.

In this way, software is not like cars; it’s more like something like a TV channel or a magazine subscription. If a magazine stops publishing issues, or a TV channel stops transmitting, you wouldn’t say “Omni Magazine is…” or “The Festival TV channel is…”, even though video recordings and magazine issues still exist.

Heh. I'd actually be super curious how much of a base linux system is still "actively maintained" by that metric. I gave up tilting at windmills trying to get the default whois clients in any of the major distros updated after a few months of trying.

I know that Debian, as a rule, removes packages which are not maintained “upstream”.

Regarding Whois clients specifically, it seems that Debian maintains its own Whois client: <https://github.com/rfc1036/whois> This is something which Debian usually does not do, and when it happens, it usually means that there is no updated maintained version available, but the software is too important to remove.