MIT keeping their /8 would actually make IPv4 addresses more scarce and thus encourage other organizations to migrate to IPv6 faster. But on the other hand, they would be crazy not to do anything with that money.
> MIT is only giving up half of this mother lode, so each student merely is allocated ~700 each. MIT also claims 14m of those IPs have never been used in internet history.
Good. I didn't realize how many ip addresses they have. I think that universities are endowed with finite resources like land or ip addresses have a responsibility to make them available to students and fellows, and by extension, improve society.
Selling everything to the highest bidder isn't something I want to see done.
MIT student body size: ~11,200
Unique IPs on this block: ~16.7 MILLION.
That's ~1500 unique IPs per student.[1]
>Students ran servers in their dorms. Clubs ran servers. Some professors ran servers.
Well, they're still keeping a whole boatload and IPv6 is here, so you're lamenting a scenario that isn't actually happening. MIT students will not have a shortage of IPs for such activities.
Sorry, but we're way past the point of any rational argument to reserve 16 million ipv4 IPs for such a tiny student body. IPv4 hoarding is counter-productive. It keeps organizations from moving to v6 in a timely fashion and over-powers organizations that ran quickly during the IP goldrush way back when. Its not merit based and its just dirty politics as far as I'm concerned. We have v6 now and setting up v6 to v4 gateways is trivial for v4-only destinations. If anything if you love hacking around and setting up boxen then you should be thrilled at what v6 is offering and the amount of addresses you can trivially get, not the opposite. Its legitimately democratizing due to the lack of scarcity while v4 allocation is nothing but representative of the dirty politics and dirty economics of scarcity.
I doubt Vint Cerf is crying in his cornflakes about MIT giving up v4 addresses, and I would assume he's thrilled to hear about v6 getting more traction:
Some researchers wanted a 128-bit space for the binary address, Cerf (recalled) ... But others said, "That's crazy," because it's far larger than necessary, and they suggested a much smaller space. Cerf finally settled on a 32-bit space that was incorporated into IPv4 and provided a respectable 4.3 billion separate addresses.
"It's enough to do an experiment," he said. "The problem is the experiment never ended."
http://www.networkworld.com/article/2227543/software/softwar...
[1] MIT is only giving up half of this mother lode, so each student merely is allocated ~700 each. MIT also claims 14m of those IPs have never been used in internet history.
https://gist.github.com/simonster/e22e50cd52b7dffcf5a4db2b8e...