Death of a Registry

["William X. Walsh" <william@tjns.tj>]

Today marked the passing of a non-profit user operated service that for the
last three years provided an invaluable service to the Internet Community.

The Monolith SubDomain Registry (http://www.ml.org) officially disbanded today.

Providing third level domain name service for free, and many other services,
Monolith provided service to well over 200,000 domain named, using donations of
time, money and hardware from its global users.

Few registries can claim to have been as responsive to their users as the
Monolith service was, and all registries can learn from the shining example
Monolith set.

Monolith proved that a low budget registry can work and provide reliable and
quality service.  This is an example that we all should learn from.

We talk about large commercial models, and the large amounts of money to setup
a registry service, and the reserves that a registry should have.  Monolith had
no such reserve, they started with nothing but donated CPU on donated bandwidth.
This registry served over 200,000 domains on a budget that wouldn't pay for the
nice dinners many of the participants on this list enjoyed at the recent
ICANN/DNSO meetings around the world.  And they served those domains up with a
quality that any registry should be proud of.

Their passing, for internal organizational issues mainly, will be felt
throughout the world, affecting not only the 200,000 domain users, but also the
many people who took advantage of the information on those domains' websites,
and those who used the services many of those domains provided free to other
users.  These included open source software developers, schools, churches, and
hobbists, and countless others who cannot be categorized.

Monolith was an example of Synergy in action.  I was proud to have been a
former volunteer staff member and department head, and to have had the
opportunity to work with such a fine group of people.

To Aveek Datta, the founder, and the other members of the board and staff of
Monolith who kept this service running for so long, Good Job.  I wish you all
luck in whatever endeavors you embark on now.


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William X. Walsh (WXW7/WW1506)| TJ Network Services - The .TJ NIC
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Date: 02-Dec-98 / Time: 16:55:08