Get the latest tech news
Postel's Law and the Three Ring Circus
’s Law famously states that “implementations should follow a general principle of robustness: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.” For many years, this was considered a bedrock design principle for internet ecosystems, but in recent years it has fallen out of favor. In this post I will explain the deterioration that ecosystems which endeavor to follow Postel’s Law frequently experience, and why it produces particularly pernicious results in the context of open source software.
In this post I will explain the deterioration that ecosystems which endeavor to follow Postel’s Law frequently experience, and why it produces particularly pernicious results in the context of open source software. For this reason, the maladaptive pressures of ecosystems following Postel’s Law can produce evolutionary dead ends, where improvements in any direction are rare. We already know the basic dynamics of the asymmetric nature of Postel’s Law: if the producers deviates from the specification, there’s a strong tendency to say its the consumers responsibility to be more liberal and accept the (in principle) malformed data.
Or read this on Hacker News
