On Sep 29, 2005, at 9:39, Dean Anderson wrote:
Let me ask you Ken: Are you participating in the IETF as part of
your job? Or
are you just here for personal kicks?
It's part of my job; has been for a few years.
It has nothing to do with legal standing. Its a question of
etiquette. Office
etiquette and backyard-fence etiquette are different.
True.
Still, it is generally considered discourteous among most serious
email users,
I think. But we seem to have gone past the point where that
matters to
people.
This is only true with respect to PERSONAL communication. BUSINESS
communication
is not personal communication.
"Business communication" is not one homogeneous class of
communications. Technical matters on the IETF lists are one thing;
personnel discussions about employees would be quite another. And
the level of privacy expected, and the degree of rudeness associated
with publishing someone's not-previously-public communications, vary;
they are not binary choices. Email I might exchange with selected
individuals outside MIT on how to implement some feature in our (open
source, repository-accessible) product would fall somewhere in
between. In my experience there is certainly work-related email that
is not legally required to be private but would be considered rude to
disseminate widely without getting permission.
In this particular case, where it sounds like the mailing list was
explicitly kept off the recipient list, that sounds like a pretty
clear indication that the sender probably didn't want it as public as
the previous mail being responded to -- much as if someone took you
aside from a crowd to make a couple of comments instead of shouting
at you in the middle of the room. Perhaps you don't distinguish
those cases; other people do. But apparently your interpretation of
business etiquette trumps his wishes, and whatever his intent was in
not including the IETF at large ... in your mind, though apparently
not his, and not mine.
You don't understand the distinction between business and personal.
I understand that the type of a communication cannot be fully
represented in one binary digit.
Actually, I'm now convinced that this is the whole problem with the
abuse at the
IETF: An inability to distinguish between personal and
organizational interests
and subject matter.
There may be some of that. I strongly doubt that's all there is to
it, though.
So, if I wanted to make comments to you about IETF matters,
people's personal
conduct on mailing lists, etc, that I didn't want made public to fuel
arguments I specifically don't want to add to, I should ask you to
sign an NDA
first? Got it, I'll keep that in mind.
Those are business topics. If you are concerned about "fueling"
something, then
you should keep silent. Only a lack of fact adds "fuel", otherwise
known as
hyperbole.
Sometimes what's needed is to encourage both sides to step back a bit
from a dispute for a while, or suggest that one side use or abandon
some specific line of argument to make the discussion more
productive. I think that's sometimes better done in private
communication with individual parties rather than in public, but it's
still business, and one shouldn't need an NDA to figure out that it's
preferably not to be made public. (Then again, I guess sometimes
making it public -- "look! even so-and-so thinks you're a loser!
clearly I'm right!" -- may suit one person's desire to fan the
flames, or to "win" at all costs. It may be jumping to conclusions
to think that *everyone* wants a polite, productive discussion, or
that they're capable of engaging in one in the face of strong
opposition....)
I'm sad to say, I've actually looked at a little of the stuff you've
posted on the web page you set up recently, concerning Ted Ts'o. I
picked the "July 1" off-list stuff to look at, briefly. From that
admittedly small sample... let me try to phrase this carefully to
avoid anything that might be construed as an ad-hominem attack: I
disagree with your summary of some of the messages I reviewed.
Ted disagrees with you on the importance of some things you bring up,
and says what you're presenting isn't very useful (to the discussion
at hand, I would assume he meant, on reading his message); your
summary turns this into ``Tso says facts are "not useful" to the
IETF.'' Without a qualifier like "these facts" and "this
discussion", that's an unsupported, even absurd, generalization;
you're ascribing to Ted statements that he did not make.
Ted asked for information on the "court-proven liars" (plural, your
phrase), and you seem to have responded with info on multiple court
cases against one person. Ted points that out, and uses the somewhat
inaccurate description "lost a lawsuit" in doing so. He does
acknowledge that this *one* person is, in at least one instance, a
"court-proven liar" as you put it; his wording could be read to
suggest, but does not actually state (as your summary says he does),
that there was only one lawsuit. "Has lost such a lawsuit", to me,
does not at all suggest "only one"; "person who lost a lawsuit" does
suggest it somewhat, in this context. "One proven act" would suggest
it more strongly, though by that point he's talking in more general
terms.
But his emphasis appears to be on the number of defendants rather
than lawsuits, and that whole aspect isn't the main thrust of his
message, which is suggesting that the focus should be on the disputed
statement rather than the character of the person making it. And if
you accept Ted's point that the lawsuits aren't as important as
examining the disputed statement, the difference between the logical
"there exists a lawsuit" and "there were three of them" isn't very
important -- a logical step I think he should've made more explicit
in his message -- and then the references to "a lawsuit" and "one
proven act" are more clearly in the "there exists" sense. (And if I
were in Ted's shoes at that time, I probably would've ignored the
implied suggestion that I go hunt through your web site or use Google
to try to find the information I had asked you to provide on the
other people your use of the plural implies.)
I haven't read up on enough of the context to form an opinion on the
reputation versus statement accuracy issue in this instance.
So, to summarize my look at a few of the messages: You both lose
points for some of your statements or how you tried to make your
arguments, and the accuracy of the summary page is questionable.
None of it, so far, really suggests any sort of professional
dishonesty on Ted's part to me. (If this were a research paper
instead of an email message, I'd probably want him to be much more
careful and even pedantic in his arguments, but that would be about
the quality of the work, not honesty.)
Bored now, and not interested in the case under discussion in that
old thread; I'm going to stop digging....
Ken
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