I have sent the following reply to Keith and Harald concerning our use
of company names in the Printer Working Group press release. I did not
bother to include the WinWord attachment with this copy, but it was sent to
Keith and Harald. They may refuse to read it or it might get dropped by
their email software, but I wanted to give them the real original in this
case, not an ASCII version in which the PWG banner could not be included.
Carl-Uno
-----
Keith,
I am seriously sorry and worried that this has upset people in the IETF, it
was certainly not intended. A few remarks to our defense:
1) We discussed your comments in one of our conferences, and it was
suggested that if the press release was clearly labeled as coming from the
PWG, giving their view and comments about the IPP project, we would not
violate any
IETF rules. All distributed copies to the media had a big logo stating that
this was issued by the PWG. I now realize that it was a mistake not to
inform you personally and explicitly, rather then relying on your reading
what comes out on the IPP DL. I have attached a copy of the exact text that
was distributed to the media (hope you have some means of reading an MS
Word document), so that there is nothing unclear about the exact content.
2) There were a number of further drafts after April 17, distributed for
review
on the IPP list. Why did you not speak up, if you noticed that your
comments had not been taken into account properly?
3) What is the difference between a particular company putting out a press
release about supporting a particular IETF project and the PWG (as a group
of cooperating vendors) doing the same? A lot of such press releases
including company names appear all the time. A recent example was a press
release from Novell on IPP a couple of weeks ago, which was published on
the IPP DL.
4) A general observation about the policy not to mention company names is
that it does not seem to be applied in practise, even in IETF sanctioned
publications. How do you explain that not only author names, but also the
company or organisations they belong to are mentioned on the front page of
every RFC? On the IETF WG mailing lists, people usually have a signature
that in most cases contain their organisation, phone number etc. Should
that also be forbidden?
I am willing to take on the cost of sending out a correction to the press
release, but we would like you to draft the text. Especially if you want it
out by May 6, there is not a lot of time for sending drafts backwards and
forwards. We should need your draft on the IPP DL by Monday morning, so
that people in the WG have a chance to see it and comment, before it gets
distributed. FYI, we spent about 3 weeks to reach agreement on the earlier
release.
Concerning the Web pages, I want you to give a few concrete examples. There
might be some older documents on our FTP site, from the time before we were
established as a WG, that might fall under the category you mentioned, they
could simply get deleted (or have access restricted to the members of the
PWG).
I cannot commit to go through all our documents on the Web site for
possible re-editing by May 6. That is unreasonable, people in this project
are working very hard and should not have to give up their week-end to do
this. This is not unwillingness, it is just realism. Also, you have not
given us any earlier indications that anything on our Web site was not in
order.
Actually, I just received the following message from our web editor in
response to your message:
-------
A quick check of the Web pages shows that other than the press release
itself there was only one place a company name was used: next to the name
of the Web page maintainer ("Jeffrey L Copeland at QMS, Inc."). That was
there to keep me from getting confused with the Jeffrey Copeland at
Systemhouse, but I've removed it anyway.
As a stop-gap for the press release problem, I've removed the references
to it on the web page. As soon as there's a fix for the release itself,
I'll put the new one up.
----
Even though it seems that your latest message and directions are a slight
overreaction, I can assure you we will do our best to comply - within reason.
Regards,
Carl-Uno
IPP WG co-chair
Carl-Uno Manros
Principal Engineer - Advanced Printing Standards - Xerox Corporation
701 S. Aviation Blvd., El Segundo, CA, M/S: ESAE-231
Phone +1-310-333 8273, Fax +1-310-333 5514
Email: manros at cp10.es.xerox.com