Sam, I've gotten rather disappointed with your tactics of late. I choose to take part in the ASF and its decision making processes. I choose not to have information that would limit my financial viability via making me party to a Non Disclosure Agreement.
I'd like to avoid a situations such as say someone posts some NDA'd spec for a VM as part of some JSR you're working on and I then go and start working on Mono and Sun takes my house for "disclosing".. (possibly without me even reading it)
That isn't possible. Even if you were to read "secret" information, you cannot be sued for making use of public information once it has become public, nor can you be sued for making use of your secret knowledge to create something that is not derived from the presentation of that information from Sun, presuming that you can demonstrate it wasn't derived from the secret (which would be easy for Mono).
What you can be sued for is taking information that is distributed under
NDA and making it public, even if you are not a party in the NDA. As long
as you know that Sun considers it to be a trade secret and has not
published it themselves, you cannot publish that information regardless of
how it was obtained. Signing, or not signing, the NDA is irrelevant.
Even if you never see the secret information, and have no ties to anyone
who has access to it, you can be sued. The company simply needs a reason
to believe that someone under NDA (including its own employees) might
have given you the information. However, they can only sue you for
damages caused to them by you making that information public prior
to others making it public. They cannot sue you for what you know,
and they cannot claim damages if you keep it secret.
The purpose of the NDA is to establish a contract between those who give us the information to those who receive it, such that we all agree that it is secret and will treat it as such until the originator makes the information public.
I think an open JCP list where no NDA material is permitted would be entirely appropriate.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] is more than sufficient for that purpose. There is nothing
about the JCP that is public other than what you see on jcp.org and
what the spec leads offer for public review.
In any case, the notion that you would somehow lose economic viability
from being on the JCP list is just plain backwards. A consultant with
inside information is far more valuable than one on the outside. I'll
accept a claim that you simply don't what to partake in a closed process,
which is indeed why we created the jcp list (so members who refuse to
participate in the closed process can choose to do so). However, you
should not go asking those who do participate about the facts that are
readily available to those on the list. You need to read the public
output instead.
....Roy
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