Summary

  • ISC chose OpenNG’s PrimeNG fork, Optimus-UI, for Stork’s interface.
  • A Stork 2.6 post bylined Vicky Risk says ISC plans an annual contribution to OpenNG.

PrimeTek moved PrimeNG to a commercial model and archived its open-source repository on 29 June 2026. Stork, the web console network teams use to manage ISC’s Kea and BIND, depended on that UI library. The archive ended the old upstream route for updates inside a production management tool.

ISC had already absorbed a substantial integration. Its 2025 development report records a PrimeNG upgrade across 329 files, with about 9,300 lines added and a similar number removed. That is the scale of the earlier work; the report does not quantify how much can be reused in Optimus-UI.

The Stork team considered maintaining imported PrimeNG components itself, switching to Angular Material or rebuilding the interface in HTMX. A post dated 15 October and bylined Vicky Risk records the choice: Optimus-UI, the PrimeNG fork maintained by OpenNG. It also says ISC plans to contribute financially each year. Risk leads ISC’s open-source product management and is its marketing director.

The stable Stork 2.6 release adds cross-server lease tracking, OIDC login, BIND 9 zone-transfer monitoring and Kea Configuration Backend support. Operators use Stork to inspect systems they run; the choice of an actively maintained UI therefore sits alongside the release’s operating features.

Risk’s writing on Kea shows how ISC has financed open-source work before. The organization kept some hook libraries commercial to fund development, then opened twelve after Kea became financially sustainable. Risk also said the online hook store was “not a massive success” because business buyers needed quotes, invoices, bids and vendor registration. Kea’s story shows both the limits of component sales and ISC’s use of licensing to support development. For Stork, ISC is naming a direct yearly contribution to the community maintaining the library.

The abstract for Risk and ISC DHCP director Tomek Mrugalski’s 28 October RIPE 93 talk says that, given the pace of vulnerability discovery through LLM code analysis, ISC felt it had little time to adopt another maintained open-source UI. It says alternatives research had just begun and refactoring would continue beyond the meeting. The Stork 2.6 post records the selected fork; the RIPE page does not date its abstract text, so it cannot show that the choice remained open on 28 October.

ISC says Stork is not yet earning revenue, while professional Stork support is sold as a line item in Kea support contracts. The announcement gives neither the annual contribution amount nor its term, leaving the size of OpenNG’s funded maintenance commitment unknown.

The archive changed who can update the interface, not whether Stork needs it. ISC has put a community maintainer and an annual payer on the record; the next releases will show whether that arrangement can keep pace with production needs.

Sources