A lot of IT revolves around social contracts - a set of rules in a community or forum; what is "legal" when writing code in different languages; how should an UI look so that most people could use it easily.
However, one of the most known ways for networking "social contracts" to come to be is trough Request For Comment (RFC). The main point of RFC is to introduce new guidelines for networking, since it is ever evolving. This means that some RFCs are experimental and might not be used later. Some become IETF standards.
Network operators, software developers and hardware manufacturers around the world keep an eye on RFC in order to be able to create products that are as useful as possible - compatibility being one of the main concerns.
As some of old RFCs are taught as rules to IT students, for example RFC 1034 - explaining domain names from 1987. That's 35 years ago!
What makes RFCs better and a bit more nuanced than regular social contracts is that even a bit more experimental RFCs exist, even though they might be replaced later. And that makes sense - networking itself is changing every day. And thus, the most useful ones get to stay and become obvious knowledge to the specialists.
https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/glossary/social-contract-theory
https://www.ietf.org/standards/rfcs/
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1034
Kommentaare ei ole:
Postita kommentaar