NTT America Gives Open Sourcers a Transit Boost
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Who says contributions to open source have to be software-based? As Datamation notes, "NTT America, a Tier 1 carrier and a division of Japan-based NTT Communications, is now helping open source by donating IPv6 transit to the Internet Systems Consortium (ISC)." There is also a release out about the arrangement. Mozilla, FreeBSD and many other open sourcers are positioned to benefit from the donation.
The IPv6 transit provided by NTT America to ISC is being used to support F-root name server operations, and country-code top level domains that are ISC DNS hosting guests and participants in ISC's Hosted@ISC efforts. These participants include kernel.org, Mozilla, FreeBSD, Internet Archive and other organizations.
“The FreeBSD Project greatly appreciates the opportunity to use ISC’s high-performance IPv6 transit,” said Robert Watson, president of the FreeBSD Foundation and Hosted@ISC participant. “As early adopters and implementers of IPv6 networking, this gives us the chance to exercise and improve IPv6 support in our operating system, as well as serve our current IPv6-ready users better.”
IPv6 is an Internet layer protocol, intended as the successor for IPv4, the still dominant Internet protocol. IPv6 has been much heralded by Internet pioneer Vint Cerf and others for its promise in providing much larger address space online, which in turn means more flexibility in issuing IP addresses and routing online traffic.
As I wrote in a post yesterday on 10gen and cloud computing, it's very likely that those who need cloud infrastructure and services will end up paying for them, even as more and more free and open source software tools for cloud applications appear. Likewise, more and more software-as-a-service applications are going to be open source, but there will still be fees implied for hosting applications on the web, for using infrastructure, and for consuming bandwidth. Making bandwidth and infrastructure free and open source whenever possible is a good goal. It's nice to see this particular donation benefitting open source organizations.
