Re: [v6ops] Are we competitive?

[Greg Skinner <[e-mail]>]

I’m a bit late to this discussion, but there are a few comments I want to make.

> On Aug 12, 2022, at 2:54 PM, Fernando Gont <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> On 28/7/22 05:25, [e-mail] wrote:
>> Bell Labs gave UNIX to universities to make sure that they had a forthcoming generation of engineers that they could hire.  Are we properly supporting IPv6 education in universities, so that the next generation does not require a full time technical specialist to deploy and/or maintain a v6 or dual stack network?

Arguably, Bell Labs’ giving of Unix to universities didn’t render unnecessary full-time technical Unix specialists as you describe.  As is the case with network engineers, system administrators needed to be educated and groomed to maintain Unix systems.
But I wonder if the (relative) lack of (for lack of a better phrase) engineering professionals who provide networking products and services is more a reflection of how money is spent.  For example, when I was an MIT undergraduate during the early 1980s,  there were people such as Saltzer and Clark doing what would eventually become IETF work.  But there were a larger group of people doing AI research.  From what I could tell, they had more money, and thus were able to attract more students (and staffers).  They even had networking projects based on Chaosnet.  Nowadays, from what I can tell, AI gets more research and investment money than networking, and thus draws more students, staffers, etc.  It’s presented as an exciting field, full of promise for the future.

> The IPv6 part that you may want universities to cover is anything associated with principles. -- i.e., you don't want universities to produce a workforce of IPv6 engineers, but rather to teach what ew got right and what we didn't, such that when IPv[x] needs to be engineered, they are able to do a good job.

+1

For what it’s worth, Peterson and Davie’s Computer Networks: A Systems Approach <https://book.systemsapproach.org/> has a section on IPv6, but also has a full chapter devoted to networking principles.

Greg