“You know sendmail as the standard mail transport agent (MTA) of
the Internet, in use at over 80 percent of Internet service
providers (ISPs) and Fortune 500 companies. What does it mean to be
“standard,” though? And does the standardization work of such
organizations as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) matter
to you?”
“The short answers: It depends, and Yes. While standards mean
different things to different people, the IETF occupies a
preeminent role in defining the space where sendmail operates.”
“…production of RFCs is the only formal purpose of the
IETF… Other organizations promulgate standards to complement
such professional activities as continuing education,
certification, and so on; the IETF, through, concentrates entirely
on standards. RFCs range widely in topic and treatment. Some
are whimsical and brief, some formal and exhaustive. They all
emerge from roughly the same process: authorship by a small team,
which works out details behind the scenes to achieve a
consensus.”
“The IETF’s most famous slogan is “working code and rough
consensus.” RFC textual specifications develop in symbiosis with
implementations – by contrast with several organizations that
embody a “waterfall” style, generating abstract standards that are
left to others to implement. RFC proponents are invariably working
programmers…”