I think MaraDNS is an excellent DNS name server, and I think MaraDNS does
very well in comparison to the competition.

First of all, MaraDNS is a 100% free open source DNS server that is being
actively developed, and has been actively developed for a period of over
five years.  Many, many DNS server projects have come and gone over
the years; to the extent of my knowledge, only BIND, MaraDNS, NSD, and
Power DNS are still being actively developed.  Some other notable
DNS server projects which are not being actively developed:

Posadis

This project showed a lot of promise; its zone file format, for example,
was superior to MaraDNS' 1.0 zone file format.  It also has some graphical
programs which MaraDNS doesn't have at all.  Alas, there have been some
problems with the program crashing, and some serious security problems with
the underlying code.  The program does not appear to be actively developed
any more, so these problems may never be resolved.

Pdnsd

Pdnsd is an excellent little caching name server that predates MaraDNS.
Years ago, the principal author stopped actively maintaining Pdnsd; while
someone else started maintaining the software, there hasn't been a release 
for over half a year.  I have heard that pdnsd has some stability problems;
since it appears to be not actively maintined, these stability problems
may never be addressed.

In terms of security, one of the last updates removed a buffer overflow;
contrast this to MaraDNS, whose design makes buffer overflows
nay-to-impossible.

Dents

Dents was a DNS server project which the author one day lost interest in 
and stopped developing.  It was not a usable DNS server when this 
happened.

djbdns

Djbdns has enough issues that I will devote an entire section detailing
its problems.  For now, it's enough to point out that djbdns hasn't changed
one iota for over five years.  

Moodns, oakdns, etc.

A number of other ideas for open-source DNS server projects have come 
and gone over the years.  Not one of them is being actively developed.

--

Now that I have gone over the DNS servers that are not being actively
developed, I will briefly compare MaraDNS to the servers that are 
undergoing active development:

