NOTORIOUS TIGHTWAD Oracle has started to issue End-of-Life warnings to customers of Dyn, the dynamic DNS service it bought in 2016.

This wasn’t unexpected in itself but has got some noses out of joint amongst Dyn’s most faithful supporters as it appears, instead of honouring their ‘Lifetime’ status, it’s trying to sell them a new product.

We were first tipped off to this by a reader, who told us that he only found out when he saw there was an end date on his account; he had received no communication from Oracle or Dyn.

Oracle has confirmed that it is migrating Dyn products to its Oracle Cloud offerings, but in a conversation with support, our reader was told that there was no migration path but was asked whether he like to buy a subscription to Oracle instead.

It seems that we’re all agreed though – the products are being sunsetted, including the standalone DynDNS agent which was the whole point of Dyn when it started anyway.

Oracle is not exactly known for siding with the little guy, and its long-running battle with Google over Android has the potential to crush open source if left unchecked.

Our reader has emailed support a bunch of questions and received no reply to date, barring a very cut and paste sounding reply stating: “We truly appreciate all the support we received from our early donators, however, we are regrettably unable to continue lifetime DNS service as we are discontinuing our Dyn DNS products.

“While your service(s) will not carry over to OCI at no cost, you may be surprised by the affordability of OCI DNS which offers unlimited zones starting at only $0.85 per 1M queries for basic DNS.  We hope that you will check it out and consider staying with us. ”

The issue here is that of honour. The honourable thing would have been to migrate people with Lifetime licences for free. When Oracle bought Dyn, it was also buying its customer base and should be trying a lot harder than this not to lose them.

Oracle may argue that the “lifetime” refers to the lifetime of the product, not the lifetime of the customer, but if that really is its attitude, expect some of Dyn’s earliest investors to vote with their feet.