Internet Systems Consortium
development and dissemination of internet software and tools
Internet Systems Consortium, Inc., also known as ISC, is an American non-profit corporation that supports the infrastructure of the universal, self-organizing Internet by developing and maintaining core production-quality software, protocols, and operations. ISC has developed several key Internet technologies that enable the global Internet, including: BIND, ISC DHCP and Kea. Other software projects no longer in active development include OpenReg and ISC AFTR (an implementation of an IPv4/IPv6 transition protocol based on Dual-Stack Lite).
ISC operates one of the 13 global authoritative DNS root servers, F-Root.
Over the years a number of additional software systems were operated under ISC (for example: INN and Lynx) to better support the Internet's infrastructure. ISC also expanded their operational activities to include Internet hosting facilities for other open-source projects such as NetBSD, XFree86, kernel.org, secondary name-service (SNS) for more than 50 top-level domains, and a DNS OARC (Operations, Analysis and Research Center) for monitoring and reporting of the Internet's DNS.
ISC is actively involved in the community design process; it authors and participates in the development of the IETF standards, including the production of managed open-source software used as a reference implementation of the DNS.
ISC is primarily funded by the sale of technical support contracts for its open source software.
History
Originally the company was founded as the Internet Software Consortium, Inc. The founders included Paul Vixie, Rick Adams and Carl Malamud. The corporation was intended to continue the development of BIND software. The founders believed that it was necessary that BIND's maintenance and development be managed and funded by an independent organization.
The public source identifies “Internet Systems Consortium” as development and dissemination of internet software and tools. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Internet, Systems and Consortium.
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Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1668008. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
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This entry incorporates text from “Internet Systems Consortium” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.