[aklug] A note about RFCs, from the NY Times

I ran across this article and thought you folks would like it.

Mike B.

How the Internet Got Its Rules

    By STEPHEN D. CROCKER
    Published: April 6, 2009

    Bethesda, Md.

    First Request for Comment document (tools.ietf.org)

    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 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. I had to work in a
    bathroom so as not to disturb the friends I was staying with, who were
    all asleep.

    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, 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. 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 for others to explore.

    I was 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.

    Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

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Received on Tue Apr 7 10:50:40 2009