[ODFPlugtest] Chatham House Rule

[Basil Cousins]

Rob,

Should I say anything hopefully helpful?

Basil

2009/11/20 <robert_weir at us.ibm.com>

> plugtest-bounces at opendocsociety.org wrote on 11/19/2009 06:50:15 PM:
>
> > Personally, I think these rules create a complex situation of that
> requires
> > people to keep a duality in place about what can be said and what not
> and
> > can you infer things I cannot say from things I am allowed to say. Also,
> > since many bugtrackers are public, Chatham rules would stop bugs from
> being
> > allowed to be reported.
> >
> > Being cooperative is an important goal and 'Chatham rules' serves as a
> > synonym for 'be constructive' and I appreciate it as such. Strictly
> > following the rules seems impractical though. In my mind, what is more
> > important is that the standardization process allows a low threshold for
> > new implementors.
> >
>
>
> That is a fair point.  One of the primary goals of the plugfest is to
> identify interoperability bugs between implementations.  I'd fully expect
> that Microsoft or IBM or Google would take what bugs it found and report
> them to their development teams.  So at IBM we might enter a bug that says
> "Symphony 1.3 does not process feature X from implementation Y" and if
> this was due to a bug in implementation Y we would say so in our defect
> report, and then discuss how to work around the bug to the customers'
> benefit.  I'm sure something similar would happen for other proprietary
> products.
>
> Where it gets interesting is when the ODF implementation is open source
> and has its defect tracking system public.  Surely we want open source
> implementations to be able to leave the plugfest with a set of bugs to
> look at?
>
> So I don't think we want to be so strict as to prevent all implementers
> present to make use, as engineers, of the information they received in the
> plugfest.
>
> But what we want to avoid is things like:
>
> * Ascribing a statement to a specific person or company.  We shouldn't be
> reporting, "Doug Mahugh from Microsoft said that Office 2007 had bugs X, Y
> and Z".
>
> * Speaking derogatorily of another product's performance at the plugfest,
> especially where pre-release software is shown.  We want to encourage
> vendors to show their beta and earlier software.
>
> Of course facts that are know from outside the plugfest are fair game.
> Otherwise I'd just come in, show a list of all known Symphony bugs on the
> screen for 5 minutes and declare that no one can ever talk publicly about
> Symphony bugs in the future because they are all covered by Chatham House
> Rules.   The point is the confidentiality applies to the activities and
> statements of participants in the plugfest.  But if you later find the
> same bug in the publicly available version of Symphony, then I don't think
> I have any expectation that this public fact will remain secret.  Of
> course, you still would not want to discuss conversations about it from
> the plugfest or ascribe statements to participants at the plugfest.
>
> The overarching theme is you want to make it safe for engineers to
> participate in the plugfest and show, test and discuss code that is not
> yet perfect.  But facts concerning publicly available code -- I don't
> think we can expect secrecy about those.
>
> Regards,
>
> -Rob
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