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[Jeff Taylor <shdwdrgn AT sourpuss.net>]

Something else I meant to add to this discussion, and forgot about 
yesterday, regards the perceived reliability of opennic.  This is the 
whole reason this matter came up for discussion to begin with, but some 
people seem to not understand, so I wanted to provide an example...

Let's say somebody gives you a car.  It's not the nicest car, but there 
are some things about it that you really like, so much that you decide 
to get rid of all your other cars and only use this one. Now you rely on 
this car for everything -- getting to work, picking up groceries, 
helping your kids with school -- but one day the car just stops 
working.  There's no explanation, and since the car doesn't work you 
can't even go see the person who gave you the car. You finally discover 
a way to make it work again, so you go to the manufacturer to complain.  
Unfortunately they blow you off.  "Only half of the cars failed, and we 
gave it to you for free anyway, so what are you complaining about?  
Besides, it works now, so no harm, right?"

In this kind of situation, anyone would be angry, and you would have 
little faith in that manufacturer after this point.  You would probably 
go online to express your frustration and other people who had no 
previous knowledge of the product would be swayed by your opinions.

OpenNIC is a product.  We may not be incorporated, and we may not sell 
anything, but it is a name known for what it provides.  OpenNIC has been 
running since 1999, and many people have worked hard to keep it alive 
and well, and provide a reliable service that inspires trust in those 
who come asking about it.  The situation above describes what happens 
when you let one person control a large percentage of the available 
servers.  I don't even know if the effected server ever went offline, 
but the point is they *could* have.  What happens if somebody doesn't 
like the way things are run, and decides to suddenly drop all of their 
servers?  Keep in mind that all of the public DNS servers are provided 
by volunteers who have the ultimate say over what they are 
contributing.  Not everybody will agree all the time.  There has already 
been some serious heat in regards to this very debate.

The point of creating limitations is to minimize the impact of any 
single individual dropping out of the project.  Yes, it is great that 
some people are willing and able to contribute a large number of 
servers, but the concern is about the impact to opennic when any 
individual decides to leave (and in some cases, circumstances may force 
their departure).  We want to provide a solid service to opennic users, 
but it is also beneficial to have larger numbers of servers available, 
so where do we draw the line?

To some extent, we can control the impact through the suggested servers 
on the front page of the website.  I have been working on some new code 
(nearly complete) which will generate a list of public servers with the 
requirement that there is some diversity in the owners of the servers, 
so that nobody should be impacted by a single member leaving the 
project.  Ideally if we had something like anycast available, it would 
never matter if servers left as the users would still be connected to 
working servers, however that service costs more money than we can 
reasonably guarantee.  As mentioned previously there may be other 
software solutions that can help us out.  But for now, we have to work 
with what we've got, and that includes a danger to users when servers 
are removed from the list.