On Mon, 17 Mar 2003 07:20, Hans Bergsten wrote:
The "NDA" in the JCP agreement only applies to "confidential information". After a public draft has been published, the info it contains is no longer confidential.
Not necessarily. There are plenty of information that may not make it into the public draft but may still be relevant. In particular implications of certain design decisions. Even when a draft becomes public you may be restricted from discussing points and implications of decisions.
I have been thinking about a "strategy pattern" which could have helped in some cases.
Let us imagine that we fear that some decision will harm the forthcoming spec. If we are inside, we know about it from discussions. If we are not, we could just fear out of intuition, people speaking, "weather reports", etc.
One possible strategy is:
* make a (good) open proposal which would neutralize/counteract this decision in the public list, and have it accepted by the community. I mean, outside of the EG or JSR process.
If your idea is good enough, it will catch and then:
* either the EG will be forced to accept it while the process is going
* or they will have to go out of their caves for a "public battle"
* or they will have to face disappointed users during the public draft phase, as the idea would already be accepted, even on their way to be implemented.
If we loose the open battle, maybe the proposal or the concern was not that pertinent, after all. If you manage to shape the minds in the community, the closed group will have a hard time reshaping them. After all, a standard is like an ontology, its main value is that it forces us to think in a given way towards a given kind of problems.
I think this *is* the way to go while a standard is not yet set. If we are speaking about a revision of a spec, it can be much more difficult to handle the situation in this way, as people minds are already "framed" by the spec.
The key point is that the NDA binds you not to disclose other people's intellectual property, but not yours. While it would be a lot of work to try this approach, a healthy community would pick up a good proposal and amplify it quickly.
P.S) I'm turning back to the original subject, as too many similar projects, in a way, helps for this kinds of strategies to be viable in the long term.
-- Santiago Gala High Sierra Technology, S.L. (http://hisitech.com) http://memojo.com?page=SantiagoGalaBlog
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