Let’s not forget the significance of the wording of “request for comment” in the original networking specs. All of the inventors of TCP/IP were academics worki

Let’s not forget the significance of the wording of “request for comment” in the original networking specs. All of the inventors of TCP/IP were academics working on gov’t grants and didn’t have the authority to create specifications for network protocol... but if the spec were present as an invitation for discussion rather than “hey, I figured this out and this is how I’m doing it and you should too” then the project managers and bean counters were happy about it. See RFC 2555: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2555 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2555