[Linux-pe] An Account of RFCs, from the NY Times

[Alan McConnell]

Assembled Wisdom!

I thought the article given below was interesting.  It seems to provide
a counterweight to the views occasionally expressed, that the Internet
came to be because of huge Pentagon influence.  The article reminds us
that there were other forces at work.

Best wishes,

Alan


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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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-- 
Alan McConnell :  http://patriot.net/users/alan
  The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine 
  that age brings wisdom. -- H.L.Mencken