And Now for Something Completely Different (was Re: IPv6 news)

Sun Oct 16 20:20:51 UTC 2005

On Sun, 16 Oct 2005 10:55:38 EDT, Joe Abley said:

> Thought experiment: how many different software vendors need to  
> change their shipping IPv6 code in order for some new feature like  
> shim6 to be 80% deployed in the server and client communities of hosts?
> 
> I'm thinking it's probably less than 5, but I'd be interested to hear  
> opinions to the contrary.

Client end, if Microsoft, MacOS X, and the various Linuxoids shipped, you'd have
pretty good coverage.  Maybe Solaris 11 if they're still relevant by then.  A
few vendor Unixoids (AIX, Irix, etc), and proprietary systems (z/OS), but those
vendors will either read the writing on the wall or fade away...

Router end, probably same number - Cisco, Juniper, Linksys and a few other
SOHO-class vendors, plus a few I've overlooked.

The number is certainly more than 5, very likely close to 1 dozen, unlikely to
be more than 2 dozen.

Of course, even if everybody shipped a *working* *interoperable* product today
(quit giggling - we're being hypothetical here), you'd still have a 3-5 year
timeframe before all the stuff sold yesterday and years previous got upgraded
or replaced.
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