Internet Systems Consortium, Inc., also known as ISC, is a Delaware-registered, 501(c)(3) public charity non-profit corporation which succeeded Internet Software Consortium, Inc., the original ISC.

The ISC main office is at 950 Charter Street in Redwood City, California 94063.

History

ISC was founded in 1994 as Internet Software Consortium, Inc. by Rick Adams, Carl Malamud and Paul Vixie with UUNET funding to develop and support a number of Internet software reference implementations. In January 2004 the original ISC's projects, assets and staff were transferred to Internet Systems Consortium, Inc., the current ISC.

Internet software

Software developed and maintained by ISC includes BIND, OpenReg, a DHCP implementation, INN, and an NTP implementation.

ISC licence

ISC developed and uses the ISC licence which is functionally similar to the MIT license. The ISC licence is OpenBSD's preferred licence for new code.

DNS root server

ISC operates the DNS "F" root server, the first such server to be distributed using anycast. In 2007 it was announced that ISC and ICANN would sign an agreement regarding the operation of F, the first such agreement made between ICANN and a root-server operator.

Usenet moderators list

ISC maintains the central Usenet moderators list and relays for moderated groups so individual server operators do not have to track moderator changes.

Internet Domain Survey

The Internet Domain Survey searches the Domain Name System (DNS) to discover every Internet host. The survey began when only a few hundred hosts were Internet linked. The earliest published reports dated 1993 were performed by Network Wizards owner Mark K. Lottor. The Internet host count was 1,313,000 in January 1993 and 489,774,269 in the latest July 2007 survey.

ISC is the current sponsor and publisher with technical operations subcontracted to Network Wizards.