The announcement of conclusion of the KAME project

Dear all,

This is an important announcement from the KAME project.

It is our pleasure to announce that the KAME project has achieved its project mission, which was to establish the IPv6 platform technology and to deploy the IPv6 technology to the industry. We have observed that the missions of the KAME project, which were to provide an open reference implementation of the IPv6 protocol, have been achieved and so have decided that we can conclude the project. The KAME project will complete its work on the IPv6 reference implementation around the end of March 2006.

We will conclude the project and then move on to other work in related areas through the following two activities.

  1. Complete merging the KAME's IPv6 protocol stack into BSD operating systems source code suite, in order for the core IPv6 protocol stack to be maintained in each BSD community thereafter.
  2. KAME members are going to focus on the next R&D items associated with IPv6 technology, while enhancing the collaboration and cooperation with the WIDE project members at large and some other related R&D organizations. The WIDE project, along with the members of the KAME project, has focused on some specific important areas including advanced core functions or applications associated with IPv6 technology. In other words, the WIDE project is going to reinforce the IPv6-related activities, rather than just to continue our effort on IPv6, according to the success and the conclusion of KAME project activity.

The WIDE project established the KAME project in 1998. The primary mission and the goal was to develop and to deploy the reference code of IPv6/IPsec and other advanced protocols related with the IPv6 system, in order to enable the deployment of the IPv6 technology.

The majority of our implementation has been already merged into 4 major BSD operating systems (BSDi/FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD) and we believe the implementation is now quite stable, and has been integrated into many commercial products. This means that KAME's major task, which is to provide a reference implementation both to academia and to industry, has been achieved.

Through various discussions with IETF members and others, we have reached a conclusion that there are no major issues in the basic functionality of our IPv6 code base. In fact, the IETF is now discussing how to make the core protocols advance to a full standard. Also, we can observe many IPv6 products other than BSD systems, including various kinds of commercial products/services, in the commercial market.

We have observed:

  1. The KAME project has achieved its development and deployment goal associated with the IPv6 core protocol stack/functions
  2. The IPv6 core protocol specifications have matured and are now stable.
  3. Products and services using the IPv6 technology have been widely developed and deployed.

Given the above observations, we have realized that we can (and should) conclude the KAME project activity, in order to let the industry realize that IPv6 is stable enough for commercial development and deployment.

To conclude the KAME project, we will focus on integrating all remaining KAME functionality into the *BSD operating systems. We hope to complete this effort by the end of March 2006.

Some advanced features currently developed and distributed by the KAME project are not ready to be merged into BSD systems yet. Those include SCTP/DCCP, Mobile IPv6, NEMO, and IKEv2. We do not plan to incorporate them by the end of March 2006. Instead, the research and development activities on these features will continue via other working groups in the WIDE project.

The following is a summary of the related groups:

SCTP/DCCP
WIDE SCTP WG( http://member.wide.ad.jp/wg/sctp/)
Mobile IPv6/NEMO
WIDE Nautilus6 project (http://www.nautilus6.org/)
IKEv2
WIDE ipsec WG ( http://www.wide.ad.jp/project/wg/ipsec.html)
DHCPv6
A new development activity is planned
pim6sd/pim6dd
A new development activity is planned

Other IPv6-related activates will also continue.

IPv6 code for Linux
The USAGI project ( http://www.linux-ipv6.org/)
IPv6 testing and evaluation
The TAHI project ( http://www.tahi.org/)

Likewise, the mailing list "snap-users" will remain and the current core members of the KAME project will support questions/comments, if any, as much as possible.

We hereby thank those who helped us. Without their help, our goal would have not been achieved. We believe the IPv6 will be deployed more universally in the near future.

May IPv6 be with you...

The KAME project (http://www.kame.net/)

The WIDE project (http://www.wide.ad.jp/)