What does that even mean?

Open source software is software where the source code is available and developers can both check what is in it, as well as fixing it and improving on it. Essentially it is the opposite to proprietary software where the code is protected from prying eyes and any modifications.

The more technical and legal definition of what that has to look like is a lot more verbose, and depending on the type of OSS license there are quite a few variants on the theme.

While bigger software projects are probably that little bit higher profile and easier to get maintainers (paid or otherwise) a lot of software is important or essential, but it’s not as glamorous. What that means in reality is that when stuff breaks, or when a security issue is identified, that it’s more of a problem to get it fixed quickly.

XKCD’s comic is the one we all use to illustrate the problem:

There’s been a lot of discussion in multiple fora over the years about how best to fund open source and there are some very large companies who have managed to build highly successful businesses around OSS. Sadly, however, they’re the exception and not the rule. A lot of open source work gets done against the odds and without the financial backing it could benefit from.

About a year ago I became involved in Nominet’s DNS Fund. I’ve worked in the Internet technology sector for well over 20 years and I’ve been actively engaged in policy and governance for a lot of that time. The DNS Fund for me is one of the more interesting and exciting projects I’ve had the honour to be involved with in the past 20 plus years. Nominet, in common with some other country code domain name registries, has a “public benefit” angle, so it uses part of its profits for various community initiatives. The DNS Fund is, to my mind, the best use of those funds that they’ve come up with so far.

The Domain Name System (DNS) is one of the Internet’s core pieces of infrastructure. Every time you visit a website, send an email, use an app or use any online service, DNS translates human-readable names into the addresses computers use to communicate. It’s something most people never think about until it stops working.

So what is the DNS Fund?

It’s a grant fund that supports the open source projects and maintainers keeping critical DNS infrastructure secure and stable. £370,000 in its first year, and £650,000 this year.

Applications are open now, with a deadline of 17th August 2026. Full details here.

Other domain name registries should seriously consider doing something similar. The DNS needs investment in the fundamentals, not in glossy annual reports or overpaid consultants.

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The Irish Times has been publishing work by Martyn Turner for over 50 years and they also do a calendar every year:

Yes, that’s our logo on there!

I’ve always like Martyn’s work so this collaboration is particularly nice and I’m really looking forward to getting my hands on the calendar next week.

So mark the date in your calendar if you’re in Ireland – December 26th!

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Here are my slides from today:

If you’re interested in attending the upcoming ICANN meeting in October 2025 you can find full details here.

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We’re currently doing a bit of radio advertising. This isn’t the first time we’ve advertised on radio. We’ve run a few campaigns in the past, both alone and with industry partners.

However this time round we chose to go down a slightly quirkier route.

You can listen to the ad here:

What say you?

Do you like it?

Do you hate it?

When I came up with the company name over 20 years ago it was heavily influenced by my life long fascination with knights on horseback and of course a fixation with the Arthurian legends. We’ve played around with the iconography quite a bit over the years, but this is the first time we’ve really gone to town on it for a radio ad.

(Of course the first time I did get to meet an actual knight I was sorely disappointed but that’s another story entirely … )

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What are you advertising?

Who is your ideal buyer?

Where can you find them?

It’s not an exact science and some print ads give very little return. They might help with the mythical “brand awareness”, but when you’ve got a finite advertising budget you have to be very careful where you spend every Euro.

In the Irish market there are a national newspapers, regionals and locals. And there’s also the free ones that get shoved through your letterbox whether you want them or not.

We

At the moment one of the services that we’ve been focussing on is broadband. Unlike most of the services we offer our broadband services is for both domestic and business use. Sure, we tend to make more money from the business broadband clients, but the lines between the two cohorts have got quite fuzzy over the last couple of years. Whereas prior to the pandemic only a subset of people worked from home these days remote work and hybrid setups are commonplace. A year ago they were *the* only way for many people to work.

So here’s the ad copy we’re using in print media in Ireland:

We’ve been iterating on the imagery we’re using for our ads in general and we’re firm believers in keeping them as light on text as possible. As for the imagery, I’d hope that what we’re trying for is fairly self-evident.

We’ll probably continue to iterate on the ad artwork.

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Research is important. Be that academic, commercial or government led. We need to know how things work and whether or not they work well. You can’t build robust policies (or laws) in a vacuum and you need to know how well (or badly) they’re working. For us as a company the kind of research we come across most often is that conducted by the various vendors we work with. So, for example, a registry operator might do research on domain name renewal rates, pricing or attachment of various services. Seeing how these various things work together can help us all to understand what kind of services the market needs or how to position them more effectively.

But when we are asked to help with research we know full well that it is for some kind of research or survey. We can choose to participate or not and we also know why we’re being asked the questions we get.

Unfortunately some people don’t seem to “get” this and think it’s perfectly acceptable to suck people and companies into their research dishonestly.

Some privacy researchers at Princeton fall into this category. I’ve written about it all in more detail here.

What I don’t understand is why so many people seem to think that the non-apology from the main guy is so “wonderful”. Is this a cultural thing?

We’re yet to receive an apology. And many of the recipients of the original bogus emails still won’t be aware that they were all part of a “study”.

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But until now we’d never ever done outdoor advertising. It’s not that I’ve got an issue with outdoor ads but they really made sense to me when we wanted to advertise something that was very location specific

If you’re in Carlow town you can see our ads up on the ring road. One of the team took a photo of the ads in situ:

There’s a bunch of those ads up and they’ll be there for the next few weeks.

So yes, we’re also offering broadband these days. Super duper broadband And not just in Carlow, even if we’ve got the outdoor ads here.

We’ve been offering some broadband services for the last couple of years, but it wasn’t something we’d really publicised. (We’ve also got a really nice wholesale / reseller solution if you want a new service to offer your clients)

In Carlow town and environs we’ve got a range of services including fibre, VDSL and wireless, though obviously fibre is the best solution. The wireless service is handy for locations that aren’t covered by fibre at the moment, but it needs “line of sight”.

For the rest of the country the service available will depend on where you’re located. You can check what your options are by using the checker here – all you need is your eircode.

And of course we’re offering both IPv4 and IPv6!

If you have any questions let me know, though don’t get too technical on me!

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The key difference between many companies isn’t the product or the service they’re selling. Many products and services are essentially commodities. It doesn’t really matter where you buy them, as their functionality won’t change much.

What does make a difference in many cases is the people. The customer service. The sales person who you genuinely liked.

Humans. People.

They’re what makes one company subjectively better or worse than another one.

If you have a good experience with the staff in a particular company you might buy from them again. But if you’ve had a bad experience not only are you less likely to give them repeat business but you’re more likely to tell other people how bad the experience was.

For us as a company we are aware of our weaknesses. We aren’t perfect.

But what we always strive for is to deliver good service. From the first interaction you have with us it should be a good and positive experience. That’s why we use TrustPilot to collect reviews – we can’t manipulate them or buy fake positive reviews. We wouldn’t want to anyway.

We’re currently hiring for a couple of positions on our frontlines. There’s one role in our sales team and another in our technical support team.

What’s kind of perks and things do you get working for us?

You can read more about careers with Blacknight over on Blacknight.Careers. (Yeah, we like to “eat our own dog food”. We sell domains so we also use them!)

At the moment we’re all working remotely, though we’re just completing a major overhaul of our Carlow HQ and hope to be able to start returning to it before September. We’ve also got a small office in Dublin and several of our staff have always worked remotely, either all of the time or some of the time.

If you have questions let us know!

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Over the past few months business has changed. Dramatically.

Many shops are either still closed or are restricting access or limiting it.

And a lot of people aren’t as happy going out to shop as they were before.

Yes, the country is gradually re-opening, but things are far from normal.

So how are businesses going to adapt to these changes?

How about their customers?

One thing is clear. If you don’t adapt to the changes you’re going to have headaches.

Maybe that means offering your products and services in new ways. It could mean offering “click and collect” or some other blended approach.

Over the past few months we’ve been focussing on helping small businesses either get online for the first time, or adapt to the weird situation we’ve all found ourselves facing.

However we know full well that for many small businesses “online” is daunting. There’s a lot of organisations offering advice and assistance, but it can be really confusing and, frankly, more than a little overwhelming.

So we’ve put together a series of webinars that we hope will help businesses either get online for the first time, or, for those who are already online, help them improve their online offering. And yes, even start selling online!

The free webinars will be running over the next few weeks and will cover a range of topics:

How to Build a Website in 20 Minutes (24 June)
In this live demonstration we’ll show how to register your own domain name, use Blacknight siteBuilder to build a multi-page site, integrate it with your social media accounts and get it live on your customers PCs and mobile devices in less than 20 minutes.

Click and Collect: The Easy Way to Add an Online Store to any Website (1 July)
Got a basic website, but without the ability to take orders or process payments? It’s easy to add an online store with Blacknight shopBuilder.

Don’t Go Dark: Keep Your Customers – Communicate Online (8 July)
If there’s one thing we’ve learned during the pandemic, it’s that communication in a crisis is critical. As businesses recover, it’s vital to keep in touch with your customers and let them know that you are open for business.

The New Normal: Online Booking and Scheduling for Hospitality and Appointment-Based Businesses (15 July)
Got a restaurant or a hair salon? Need to control bookings and avoid large crowds in your waiting room? This webinar presents some of the online options for booking and scheduling to help you conduct your business smoothly while protecting your customers and staff.

Trust Signals: Enhance your Reputation and Credibility with Customers (22 July)
All business is based on trust, but what are the trust signals customers look for online? In this webinar we’ll explain the red flags that put customers off and show you how to use simple trust signals to enhance your online credibility and build your reputation.

We recently launched a new service for small business which lets them setup an online shop quickly, easily and, most importantly, without breaking the bank!

You can read about it here and if you’d like to join the webinars you can get more information and register here.

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However in the current situation we felt that we needed to let our clients know what we were doing and what, if any, impact the current situation was having on us.

As I tried to articulate in a recent blog post on the company blog, the current situation is not something any of us had been expecting and things are moving very fast. We had planned to test having everyone work from home, but it became very clear that the “test” was to become our new normal.

Friday evening we sent this email to all our clients. The feedback has been mostly positive, which I’m happy about.

Dear Customer,

I am writing to you as you are a Blacknight customer, to tell you about the measures we have taken to ensure continued service during the Coronavirus crisis.

As responsible citizens, our first duty is to support the appropriate government directives on social distancing, to do everything we can to limit the spread of COVID-19 and protect the most vulnerable in our society.

As of last Friday, Blacknight is operating as a distributed company, with virtually all our staff working from their homes. It’s business as usual (but you might hear dogs barking and children playing when you call).

Of course, staff who need to access the data centres will continue to do so as required. If you have dedicated servers or co-located hardware with us, now may be a good time to check with your account manager, and make sure you have the appropriate contact details for on-call support.

We have made appropriate arrangements with partners and suppliers to ensure that we have adequate capacity and contingencies in place.

Blacknight is fortunate that we can continue to operate with the current social restrictions. We are very conscious that many of you are adversely impacted by the current situation. If you’re facing financial difficulties, please reach out to our finance team to see what we can do for you.

The new reality has led to increased demand for online services. If you find that you require additional resources, please contact your Blacknight account manager or any member of the sales team.

I have written in more detail about our response to this crisis on blacknight.blog. I remind you that all announcements regarding service interruptions and maintenance are posted on blacknight.tech. We will continue to post regular updates on those sites, and on our Twitter, Facebook, boards.ie and other social channels.

For more details, go to https://blacknight.blog/a-new-reality-for-now.html

Stay safe,
Michele Neylon
CEO, Blacknight

Of course it was a little prettier than just raw text!

Over the next few weeks and possibly months I suspect we’ll all be spending a lot more time at home than we’re used to.

Maybe I’ll finally get round to doing some work on my garden!

Jokes aside, however, at a time like this “digital” and “online” will become even more important than ever before. Companies and businesses that might have been contemplating taking orders online or ramping up their online presence will probably do so. If anyone needs assistance please reach out to our team. We’ve got a lot of experience and expertise to share.

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