See PC World, "Top 50 Tech Visionaries ."
I spent some quality time reading RFC's once upon a time. It was the mid '90's and a client had a desktop application that depended on embedded FTP client that submitted batch jobs to a mainframe.
[Note. It was the 90's. Desktop computing seemed like a good idea. In the long run, it is not a good idea. Corporate information assets do not belong on a desktop. Period. People have asked me challenging questions like "Are you saying the PC/Desktop Computing revolution was a mistake?" I reply with "Yes, it was."]
The app didn't work reliably. In order to work out a way to test it, I commandeered a small Unix box and wrote a bunch of perl scripts to act as FTP server, meticulously logging everything. I made a few small changes to the desktop app, mostly to log things for debugging purposes.
[This was a kind of Test-Driven Reverse Engineering exercise. I just didn't know to call it that.]
In the process I really got to know RFC 959 . I also spent some time with RFC 793 and RFC 854 . What do they all have in common? Jon Postel. I think he was one of the pragmatic, hard-working, low-flying geniuses that makes this anarchy we call the Internet work.
Corporations and their bottom-feeding Intellectual Property lawyers are the antithesis to the kind of sensible, open, pragmatic approach that makes the Internet work. Imagine if some patent attorney was following Postel around. What would we have now?