is a rack-mounted server, and getting an A/C balance that keeps the servers cool without freezing the humans is a problem.

But that's not the point of a reference implementation,

I agree that's not the point of a reference implementation. The MIT license is a good license for a reference implementation, as is the BSD license. The question was whether it is a good license to advance free software or not. That was the argument. The goals of a reference implementation are not the creation of a free software ecosystem.

You don't know that they would have even bothered with X at all,

I don't know. But it is likely. X was the GUI for Unix. Unix was a cheap operating system that allowed hardware vendors to create workstations and then servers without investing a ton in software. Much the same role as Android (another Unix flavor) plays today. If they didn't use X and went with another GUI they would have had to invent it and support it on an ongoing basis. I can see SGI and maybe Sun. But would DEC for example have wanted that for their GUI? IBM? HP?

Then Linux fails that metric in almost all cases too.

No it doesn't. Linux as used in almost all cases is open source freely available software. The big distributions are mostly free or at the very least have free versions. Linux as an operating system mainly sells support or hardware.

Show me that claim in the context of a "BSD license failure" then.

Just keep clicking parent from this very post. You'll get to this: http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
The 3 examples to prove that the open version wouldn't be replaced where:
OpenSSH, Apache and X11. X11 of course is the example that the GPL have used for 30 years since it was such a disaster. OpenSSH has had problems. Apache has been more of a mixed bag, it mainly has remained free with a broad community of support. But a lot of the advanced capacity is proprietary.

All the ISPs that are going to switch to IPv6 are going to offer IPv4 for sites that don't support v6.

That would be good. I assume you meant FCC and not FTC. I'm not sure FTC has that power.

I agree there are government mandates and some serious work. There are also some exceptions being made that shouldn't exist. The government for example could move many of their commercial EDIs to IPv6 only and forcing companies (and thus their ISPs) to be at least partially on IPv6.

And that's how it is supposed to work, the better product wins out.

No that's not how it is supposed to work. How it is supposed to work is the free product stays free, and gets so far ahead there isn't a competition at all. Like what's happening in many domains with GPL.

If those competing UNIX vendors had to contribute back then they likely would have used their own fully proprietary implementations to differentiate eachother anyway.

You don't know that. The GPL has a track record of preventing such things.

You define failure as the existence of proprietary extensions, a definition devoted to your ideology rather than based on any objective metric.

The objective metric is whether the in use in the broader ecosystem is free or not. The claim of BSD advocates is that their software doesn't end up proprietary. Their claim is that it is a good free software license, where good is defined as advancing the interests of free software. Saying that advancing the interests of free software is an ideology is simply refusing to address the point.

Anyway I've given you clear failure. You are pretending that failures aren't failures by redefining the criteria so that everything is success. That's just dishonest.

Which it has done with a permissive license.

True. The point is not that permissive licenses always fail to maintain free software but that they do often enough so as to have established a long track record of failure.

Eventually these died out and the permissively licensed project that remained became the defacto standard

You have the order wrong. The permissive product gave birth to the proprietary product. Then another permissive product started which copied ideas from the proprietary products, passing them over a decade later.

For all the humdrum about permissive licensing being bad there is *still* no decent restrictively licensed implementation.

When it mattered there were. In 2015 no. All through the 1990s that wasn't true.

Your fantasy is that had that reference implementation been restrictively licensed the proprietary UNIX vendors would have still supported X and they would have done so by building a collaborative free X implementation, but this is just fantasy.

How do you know? That's what's happened many times with GPL products. Again there is a track record.

Additionally given the defacto implementation is still permissively licensed, what are you (or anybody else for that matter) doing to prevent this "disaster" from happening again? Or with any other permissively licensed projects for that matter?

Encourage people not to use the license. Once they have, too late.

Good point.

so how do I set up my internal DNS server so that everything works fine when my ISP gives me a new prefix every 24 hours, or every time the router is rebooted, or every time they feel like changing my prefix?

They don't do that either. They no longer use DHCP either so you have a fixed (and often more than one) IP as well. No more contention for you, no more contention for them. Remember even a midsized ISP now has more IP addresses in an allocation block than the entire internet is under IPv4.

I'm sure they might change your static address if they want to change their topology say once every 5 years or so. That's different than every boot.

Netflix I don't think uses AWS. In any case Netflix uses more bandwidth than most carriers they can get anything they custom they want from the people handling their data.

"Real economics--economics that surpasses all currently published treatises--" In other words, professional economists don't understand real economics?

Well you shouldn't just re-define positive rights away then argue they never existed in the first place. As another example, children in the US under a certain age have a right to education, and it's certainly actionable in the sense that they can sue the government to provide it if necessary. Other countries have even more actionable positive rights.

When Nokia bought Navteq they bought one of two global mapping companies, for about US$ 7.5 billion. For that they got, almost immediately, free maps for every Nokia handset. Around the planet. Also data sets for some industry leading augmented reality. Those services were, and are, huge. They sold lots of handsets and led the way to lots of Microsoft collaboration (Windows Phone et al comes with Nokia Here built-in.) That eventually led to Microsoft buying the phone unit outright. Did Nokia lose money selling Here off? Maybe, maybe not. They sold lots of handsets around the world featuring Here. That augmented reality wowed lots of folks and sold some more, plus positioned Nokia products as forward looking. They sold some online mapping to websites, though that was probably not a big revenue stream. They eventually sold the failing phone unit (and kept Here!) So they got a lot of milage out of Here, maybe US$5 billion. Going forward, I hope the new owners keep the consumer editions of Here. I'm off to Glacier Nat'l Park next week, and have Here loaded on all my handsets. The iPhone has just the states I regularly visit preloaded. One of my Android handsets has all of North & Central Americas preloaded, for fast travel convenience. I'm used to sering legions of befuddled tourists wandering around national park attractions confused their smartphone maps (Google Maps & Apple Maps, both largely dependant on streaming maps) aren't working. I used to bring a Windows phone along explicitly for those situations, now I just load Here. Oh, and why not carry a dedicated GPS unit? They don't come with cameras, translators, phones, email, etc. Their maps? Likely sourced from, yes, Here.

There are at least 3x that many. There are huge blocks of unused space but then used space if often being crowded in tightly. We are long past when we should have switched.

You can change the MAC address (last 64 bits) your system advertises. If you don't like consistency, change addresses daily or whatever. Of course once systems start using your MAC address as a sort of username...

I'm going to assume that AWS can move very quickly once their customers start demanding IPv6. It wouldn't shock me if AWS's problem is that many of their carriers (remember they use tons given Direct Connect) don't support IPv6 and thus... So again they are one of the chicken & egg type problems.

AWS as a website though is a perfect point of attack. Once geolocation breaks (or there is a serious threat) I'm going to assume they go aggressively towards offering IPv6.

. I was hoping that the threat of inevitable pain would get American businesses to switch, but it looks like we’ll just have to wait for actual pain.

Yep. Given how long everyone is waiting by the time the change starts happening it might happen rather quickly. Many businesses that have done full conversions find it is a multi-year process as there are thousands of places where they make IPv4 assumptions without realizing it. Doing that at the last minute is going to hurt.