In many ways, the IPv6 debate is similar to the x86 vs RISC debates. While everyone agrees that the Intel architecture is bad, in practice it doesn't matter all

In many ways, the IPv6 debate is similar to the x86 vs RISC debates. While everyone agrees that the Intel architecture is bad, in practice it doesn't matter all that much on big desktop chips. Linus Torvalds had a small rant about that when the Itanium was introduced: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1008015/linus-torvalds-itanium-threw-x86 http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1008015/linus-torva... The sad fact is that the x86 architecture survived because it was good enough, and there was no incentive to replace it with a "purer" design. Only in the mobile / microcontroller space has there been widespread success for more RISCy designs (ARM/AVR). This wasn't because HTC, Samsung and Apple decided that ARM was "purer", it was mostly because there was no x86 processor that could compete with the speed and power and chip real estate afforded by ARM designs. Likewise, the incentives for IPv6 aren't there, and in fact, it introduces a host of new problems for most users. For instance, I spent quite some time trying to figure out why my NTP daemon would not work. The reason? It was IPv6 enabled, as was my operating system. The NTP server was also IPv6 enabled and had an AAAA record. But my ISP didn't route IPv6, so no communication took place. Now, I could blame the NTPD creators for not thinking about this and writing some specific code for it with an IPv4 fallback (perhaps after 30 seconds just to make life interesting). Or I could blame the ISP for being slow to implement IPv6 (this was in 2004 after all). Or I could blame myself for being incompetent and just using the default config files provided by the operating system. But the fact is, this is just what happens when you have one protocol that always works, and another new protocol that sometimes works but you really want to make the new one the default, preferred protocol.