Software Development

A key part of DNS-OARC's mission is to develop, maintain and host various software tools for DNS data collection, measurement and analysis. You can find a list of these tools below, with their source code and development management here on Github.

Many of these tools have been developed in-house over time by OARC and its contributors. Others have been developed externally, and either donated to OARC by the original owner, or in some cases OARC has taken custodianship for the community of DNS tools which have become 'orphaned' from their original developers.

In keeping with OARC's nonprofit status and public benefit mission, all of the software for our tools is made available under open-source licenses - see our open-source licensing policy.

Artificial Intelligence and Large Language Model Contributions Policy

AI and LLMs, by their nature, are unable to provide the necessary assurance that the generated material is compatible with the open source licenses used by DNS-OARC projects, or that the material has been appropriately attributed to the original authors.

Thus, it is not permitted to contribute material generated by AI, LLMs, and similar technologies to DNS-OARC projects. This includes, but is not limited to, source code. Contributions that are suspected to have been generated by these technologies may be rejected without notice.

Funding Development

OARC also develops new tools as the need or opportunity for these arises. Funding for this development can come collectively from OARC's Members as part of its wider mission, from external 3rd-party grants, or can be done under contract in response to the custom needs of a specific requirement.

OARC can develop new, or enhance features of existing, tools via a custom for-hire development contract. We can accept such work from either OARC Members, or other parties (subject to available resources). OARC Members will receive priority for such work, and at a discounted rate depending on their Membership tier.

If you are interested in having OARC do custom tool development work, please contact us at admin at dns-oarc.net, and we'll be happy to discuss your requirements. We'd also welcome patches to, contributions, or donations of relevant tool code.

Support

If you are looking for support of existing OARC tools, we have a Mattermost channel for general support for all software at OARC Software and many of these also have mailing lists, and we recommend you post questions or requests for help on these in the first instance. For specific bug reports, we recommend raising these as issues on the projects.