BIND 9.14 is a stable branch of BIND. This document summarizes significant changes since the last production release on that branch.

Please see the file CHANGES for a more detailed list of changes and bug fixes.

As of BIND 9.13/9.14, BIND has adopted the "odd-unstable/even-stable" release numbering convention. BIND 9.14 contains new features added during the BIND 9.13 development process. Henceforth, the 9.14 branch will be limited to bug fixes and new feature development will proceed in the unstable 9.15 branch, and so forth.

Since 9.12, BIND has undergone substantial code refactoring and cleanup, and some very old code has been removed that was needed to support legacy platforms which are no longer supported by their vendors and for which ISC is no longer able to perform quality assurance testing. Specifically, workarounds for old versions of UnixWare, BSD/OS, AIX, Tru64, SunOS, TruCluster and IRIX have been removed.

On UNIX-like systems, BIND now requires support for POSIX.1c threads (IEEE Std 1003.1c-1995), the Advanced Sockets API for IPv6 (RFC 3542), and standard atomic operations provided by the C compiler.

More information can be found in the PLATFORM.md file that is included in the source distribution of BIND 9. If your platform compiler and system libraries provide the above features, BIND 9 should compile and run. If that isn't the case, the BIND development team will generally accept patches that add support for systems that are still supported by their respective vendors.

As of BIND 9.14, the BIND development team has also made cryptography (i.e., TSIG and DNSSEC) an integral part of the DNS server. The OpenSSL cryptography library must be available for the target platform. A PKCS#11 provider can be used instead for Public Key cryptography (i.e., DNSSEC signing and validation), but OpenSSL is still required for general cryptography operations such as hashing and random number generation.

The latest versions of BIND 9 software can always be found at http://www.isc.org/downloads/. There you will find additional information about each release, source code, and pre-compiled versions for Microsoft Windows operating systems.

BIND is open source software licenced under the terms of the Mozilla Public License, version 2.0 (see the LICENSE file for the full text).

The license requires that if you make changes to BIND and distribute them outside your organization, those changes must be published under the same license. It does not require that you publish or disclose anything other than the changes you have made to our software. This requirement does not affect anyone who is using BIND, with or without modifications, without redistributing it, nor anyone redistributing BIND without changes.

Those wishing to discuss license compliance may contact ISC at https://www.isc.org/mission/contact/.

The end of life date for BIND 9.14 has not yet been determined. For those needing long term support, the current Extended Support Version (ESV) is BIND 9.11, which will be supported until at least December 2021. See https://www.isc.org/downloads/software-support-policy/ for details of ISC's software support policy.

Thank you to everyone who assisted us in making this release possible. If you would like to contribute to ISC to assist us in continuing to make quality open source software, please visit our donations page at http://www.isc.org/donate/.