Open-Source and Open-Minded: Notes from OSCON 2011 [Archived]

By Sean Hopkins

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Last week ARIN trekked to the Pacific Northwest to check out the 2011 O’Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland, Oregon. The expo was only part of a large-scale conference chock full of lectures and keynotes and interviews about the latest in application development and open-source technologies. We found ourselves among many of the key organizations in the Internet technical community, and many of them asking why ARIN would be out talking to programmers and data center workers. The answer is two-fold.

First off, IPv6 adoption isn’t just an issue for operations. Network folks may need assistance from programmers to ensure that the organization’s software does not break due to incompatibility issues. It is important that programmers and software developers are on the same page when it comes to making a seamless transition to a dual-stacked environment.

Secondly, IPv6 adoption is critical to the future of the Internet; ARIN is out to educate everyone working for your organization. Many booth visitors we spoke to had a shared sense of urgency in having IPv6 up and running within their organization because they had already heard about it from their networking cohorts, and they knew just the right people to take IPv6 information to if they hadn’t. We have seen bigger and more network-focused crowds than we found in Portland, but it was great to hear that the people we have been talking to for years have been making it known to their fellow techies in the data centers and on the software development teams that IPv6 will be a big part of their plans for the near future!