[amsat-bb] ORI receives half million dollar grant, and it's only the first.

[Joseph Armbruster]

Phil,

I appreciate your summary of all this.  Apparently, I am late to the game
on this news story, but maybe I am not the only one and hopefully others on
the -bb learned something from this moment in history.  I know I sure did!!

Joseph Armbruster
KJ4JIO


On Fri, Sep 11, 2020 at 8:25 AM Phil Karn <karn at ka9q.net> wrote:

> On 9/11/20 03:43, Joseph Armbruster wrote:
> >
> > So Hank transferred the block of IPs to you, individually?  Was that
> > the kind of thing where you were all working on a campus together and
> > it was all word-of-mouth or was it a more formal act on paper?  In
> > 2010 though, why did Brian need to ask Hank at all?  I mean at that
> > point, they were your individual property.  I'm surprised whatever
> > university you were attending did not try to stake a claim to them.
> > Was there any paper trail regarding the ownership / transfer between
> > the original 1980 phone call request and ARDC's inheritance?
>
> IP addresses were registered somewhat informally in the early days when
> the Internet was a research project and address blocks were free, but
> they were regularly published in various Internet documents like RFCs
> (Requests for Comments). When the Internet grew up, more formal entities
> like ARIN (American Registry for Internet Numbers) and ICANN (Internet
> Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), among others, were created
> to register who owned what and to make those databases publicly
> available. At various times, Hank, Brian and I were on all these lists
> next to network 44, making us each at various times the legal owners.
>
> I haven't been a student anywhere since I graduated from CMU with my
> MSEE in 1979.
>
> Since control had been passed informally between us over the years
> according to whoever was then most willing to do the work, when IPv4
> addresses began to get scarce we got concerned that someone might try to
> grab them from us hams. So Brian proposed to create the nonprofit ARDC
> to legally own network 44. Since Hank's name and mine had also been
> associated with 44 at various times, Brian thought it important to make
> sure all of us were OK with it. I for one never thought twice about it.
> In fact, when it later dawned on us just *how* much this thing might
> soon be worth, I was even more glad that we'd all agreed.
>
> For many years Brian rejected inquiries to buy or even lease part of
> network 44, but eventually we (the ARDC board) realized that, with IPv6
> finally being deployed, IPv4 addresses wouldn't be in demand forever. So
> we authorized him to seek a buyer of the upper 1/4 that had never been
> used. I never quite let myself believe that Brian would pull it off. But
> he did, and now we have a pretty good endowment to do neat things with
> in ham radio, open source and STEM education.
>
> What really ticks me off, and always will, is that Brian had the vision
> and did all the hard work yet only lived long enough to see our first
> two grants (TAPR student scholarships and the ARISS power supply
> project).  Fate has a truly wicked sense of humor.
>
> Phil
>
>
>
>