From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <harald(_at_)alvestrand(_dot_)no>
...
The difference I see between GOSIP and the US DoD announcement is that
GOSIP was an attempt to bring something into existence by buying it; the US
DoD IPv6 announcement says that they have evaluated something that exists,
and found it useful enough to require it to be present "everywhere".
And I find that a *huge* difference.
At the start of the GOSIP nonsense, that might have been a reasonable
charge. By the middle, there were at least as many ISO OSI
applications as there are now IPv6 applications, and there was a
lot of real OSI traffic in Europe. (A "lot" for that era if not
today.) Major host vendors were supporting OSI protocols by the
end of GOSIP as well as they are now supporting IPv6. OSI support
was a required checklist item in a lot of sales situations.
The GOSIP history shows that the recent U.S. DOD IPv6 announcement
should neither be overplayed or nor completely ignored.
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com