It was created by Daniel J. Bernstein in response to his frustrations with repeated security holes in the widely used BIND DNS software.
As a challenge, Bernstein offered a $1000 prize[1] for the first person to find a security hole in djbdns, which was awarded[2] in March 2009 to Matthew Dempsky.
[7] As of March 2009, there are a number of forks, one of which is dbndns (part of the Debian Project), and more than a dozen patches to modify the released version.
The result of these design decisions is a reduction in code size and complexity of the daemon program that provides the core function of answering lookup requests.
Bernstein asserts that this is true to the spirit of the Unix operating system, and makes security verification much simpler.