Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2002 16:36:52 -0800 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: "f.johan.beisser" <jan@caustic.org> Cc: j mckitrick <jcm@FreeBSD-uk.eu.org>, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: How do basic OS principles continue to improve? Message-ID: <3C6C5824.4476B512@mindspring.com> References: <20020214101412.C21734-100000@localhost>
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"f.johan.beisser" wrote: > > | Most cutting edge CS work occurs in academia, in very > > | small groups, with no more than 4 people participating, > > | and usually, a single idealist leading the group. > > > > That's what I've heard as well. I love the fact that IPv6 is developed > > on open source operating systems, and yet will hardly be accepted in the > > networking world until Windows supports it. > > IPv6 is not a good example of "single idealist" design and developing. v6 > is definately a commitee design, and it kind of shows. the IPng workgroup > didget a few things right with the acceptance of v6, but migrating to it > is still not easy. The implementation is pretty far from committee, despite KAME and INRIA pooling forces to "committee it up". ;^). I think the main barrier to IPv6 is availability in a consumer OS. For a long time there was a "we'll support it, if you support it" starvation deadlock between the endpoint OS vendors, and the intermediate router vendors. I give IBM a bit of credit on this for supporting it on AIX before most other support was there, router, OS, or otherwise. Cisco has supported it on their routers since the loads released on 22 June 2001, and the laggard has been Microsoft from that day onward, even though they have had a "technology preview" version of the stack around for a while now. I think the primary motivation for them dragging their feet has been a "you scratch our back, we'll scratch yours" between them and the U.S. Government, which, for the most part, would just as soon not have a network infrastructure with strong cryptography built in. In fact, if we look at the "technology preview", and compare it with what actually ended up released with the IPv4 IPSEC code, and then, later, with Windows XP, we see that authentication and nonrepudiation made it, but ene-to-end encryption of content did not, and that there is still widespread dependence on SSL, instead. We also see that, even where SSL is used, it's mostly used for protection of plaintext passwords on form submits for HTTP based session establishment, but that the content thereafter is not encrypted. This is definitely true of HotMail and of Yahoo. In fact, we see that Yahoo defaults to non-encrypted authentication, as well, and you have to go out of your way to request it. > Most "this is nifty" developments happen in Free OSs, since there's little > corparate pressure to support or develop something new, or to let their > in-house projects out. I really disagree with this rationale; please see "The Innovator's Dilemma", referenced in my other post with full bibliographic information. While there is some truth to the idea that commercial products tend to lag behind the curve because of a product centric focus (indeed, I worrk about IBM research, which has been given the imperitive to bring one technology per laboratory to a product, every 6 months, suffering as a result of this focus), the Free OSs are just as resistant to change as the commercial ones. > with the release of XP, though, MS has also given out broad range of > potential v6 users (this is what i've been given to understand, i've not > had the motivation or spare hardware to check this out and verify it). I have XP on a machine I bought for $300 at Fry's the other day to install FreeBSD on (in fact, this was the genesis of my diatribe about installation an partitioning tools in FreeBSD last month); Windows XP does *not* come with IPv6 support integrated into it, at least as far as the networking "control panels" are able to discover. 8-(. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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