[Year 12 SofDev] Request for Comments

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

Cheers, RFC and the IETF :-)

* How the Internet Got Its Rules

By S.D. CROCKER  Published: April 7, 2009 
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/07/opinion/07crocker.html?ref=internet

First Request for Comment: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1
 

TODAY is an important date in the history of the Internet: the 40th 
anniversary of what is known as the "Request for Comments".

Outside the technical community, not many people know about the R.F.C.’s,
but these humble documents now shape the Internet’s inner workings, and
have played a significant role in its success. 

When the R.F.C.’s were born, there wasn’t a World Wide Web. 

Even by the end of 1969, there was just a rudimentary network linking
four computers at four research centers: the University of California,
Los Angeles; the Stanford Research Institute; the University of
California, Santa Barbara; and the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. 

The government financed the network, and the hundred or fewer computer 
scientists who used it. It was such a small community that we all got to 
know one another.

A great deal of deliberation and planning had gone into the network’s 
underlying technology, but no one had given a lot of thought to what we 
would actually do with it. 

So, in August 1968, a handful of graduate students and staff members from 
the four sites began meeting intermittently, in person, to try to figure 
it out. (I was lucky enough to be one of the U.C.L.A. students included 
in these wide-ranging discussions.) It wasn’t until the next spring that 
we realized we should start writing down our thoughts. 

We thought maybe we’d put together a few temporary, informal memos on
network protocols, the rules by which computers exchange information.
I offered to organize our early notes.

What was supposed to be a simple chore turned out to be a nerve-racking 
project. Our intent was only to encourage others to chime in, but I 
worried we might sound as though we were making official decisions or 
asserting authority. In my mind, I was inciting the wrath of some 
prestigious professor at some phantom East Coast establishment.

I was actually losing sleep over the whole thing, and when I finally
tackled my first memo, which dealt with basic communication between two
computers, it was in the wee hours of the morning.

Still fearful of sounding presumptuous, I labeled the note a "Request for 
Comments." R.F.C. 1, written 40 years ago today, left many questions 
unanswered, and soon became obsolete. 

But the R.F.C.’s themselves took root and flourished. They became the 
formal method of publishing Internet protocol standards, and today there 
are more than 5,000, and all readily available online.

But we started writing these notes before we had e-mail, or even before 
the network was really working, so we wrote our visions for the future on 
paper and sent them around via the postal service. 

We’d mail each research group one printout and they’d have to photocopy
more themselves. 

The early R.F.C.’s ranged from grand visions to mundane details, although 
the latter quickly became the most common. 

Less important than the content of those first documents was that they 
were available free of charge and anyone could write one. 

Instead of authority-based decision-making, we relied on a process we 
called “rough consensus and running code.” 

Everyone was welcome to propose ideas, and if enough people liked it and
used it, the design became a standard.

After all, everyone understood there was a practical value in choosing to 
do the same task in the same way. 

For example, if we wanted to move a file from one machine to another, and
if you were to design the process one way, and I was to design it
another, then anyone who wanted to talk to both of us would have to
employ two distinct ways of doing the same thing. So there was plenty of
natural pressure to avoid such hassles. 

It probably helped that in those days we avoided patents and other 
restrictions; without any financial incentive to control the protocols, 
it was much easier to reach agreement.

This was the ultimate in openness in technical design and that culture of 
open processes was essential in enabling the Internet to grow and evolve 
as spectacularly as it has. 

In fact, we probably wouldn’t have the Web without it. When CERN
physicists wanted to publish a lot of information in a way that people
could easily get to it and add to it, they simply built and tested their
ideas. 

Because of the groundwork we’d laid in the R.F.C.’s, they did not have
to ask permission, or make any changes to the core operations of the 
Internet. Others soon copied them — hundreds of thousands of computer 
users, then hundreds of millions, creating and sharing content and 
technology. That’s the Web.

Put another way, we always tried to design each new protocol to be both 
useful in its own right and a building block available to others. We did 
not think of protocols as finished products, and we deliberately exposed 
the internal architecture to make it easy for others to gain a foothold. 

This was the antithesis of the attitude of the old telephone networks, 
which actively discouraged any additions or uses they had not sanctioned.

Of course, the process for both publishing ideas and for choosing 
standards eventually became more formal. Our loose, unnamed meetings grew 
larger and semi-organized into what we called the Network Working Group. 

In the four decades since, that group evolved and transformed a couple
of times and is now the Internet Engineering Task Force IETF. It has some 
hierarchy and formality, but not much, and it remains free and accessible 
to anyone.

The R.F.C.’s have grown up, too. 

They really aren’t requests for comments anymore because they are 
published only after a lot of vetting. But the culture that was built up 
in the beginning has continued to play a strong role in keeping things 
more open than they might have been. Ideas are accepted and sorted on
their merits, with as many ideas rejected by peers, as are accepted. 


As we rebuild our economy, I do hope we keep in mind the value of 
openness, especially in industries that have rarely had it. 

Whether it’s in health care reform or energy innovation, the largest
payoffs will come not from what the stimulus package pays for directly,
but from the huge vistas we open up to explore .. reminded of the power
and vitality of the R.F.C.’s when I made my first trip to Bangalore,
India, 15 years ago. 

I was invited to give a talk at the Indian Institute of Science, and as
part of the visit I was introduced to a student who had built a fairly
complex software system. 

Impressed, I asked where he had learned to do so much. He simply said, “I 
downloaded the R.F.C.’s and read them.” 

Stephen D. Crocker is the chief executive of a company that develops 
information-sharing technology. A version of this article appeared in 
print on April 7, 2009, on page A29 of the NYTimes, New York edition. 

--


Cheers, IETF :)
Stephen Loosley
Victoria Australia

the net started off as groups of equal people doing what they think best,
along the way they discuss and debate then vote with their feet. And this
is still the way computers of the net work, and also life in a way i guess
the good ideas, shared-teamworked, with goodwill & altruism, enlighten all


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