Paul A. Vixie

Author of the standard UNIX system programs SENDS, proxynet, rtty, and Vixie cron, Vixie is an American Internet pioneer and well-known Unix software author who attended George Washington High School in San Francisco, California. He received a Ph.D. in computer science from Keio University in 2011 for work related to the Internet Domain Name System (DNS and DNSSEC). At one point he ran his own consulting business, Vixie Enterprises.

After he left DEC in 1994, Vixie founded Internet Software Consortium (ISC) together with Rick Adams and Carl Malamud to support BIND and other software for the Internet. He is considered the primary author and technical architect of BIND 8, and he hired many of the people who wrote BIND 9 and the people who worked on BIND 10. The activities of ISC were assumed by a new company, Internet Systems Consortium, in 2004. Although ISC operated the F root server, he at one point joined the Open Root Server Network (ORSN) project and operated their L root server.

In 1995, Vixie co-founded the Palo Alto Internet Exchange (PAIX), and after Metromedia Fiber Network (MFN) bought it in 1999, he served as Chief Technology Officer to MFN / AboveNet and later as President of PAIX. In 1998, he co-founded MAPS (Mail Abuse Prevention System), a California nonprofit company with the goal of stopping email abuse. He stated that he "now holds the record for 'most CERT advisories due to a single author.'" In 2008, Vixie served as a judge for the Mozilla Foundation's "Download Day", an attempt to set a Guinness World Record for most downloads in a single day for a new piece of software.

He was elected to the ARIN Board of Trustees in 2005, and was elected Chairman in 2009 and re-elected in 2010. His term expired 31 December 2013. Vixie has also served on the Security and Stability Advisory Committee of ICANN. In addition to several RFCs he authored or co-authored, he is the co-author of "Sendmail: Theory and Practice", Maynard, Mass: Digital Press, ISBN 1-55558-127-7, with Frederick M. Avolio (1995).