Personally, I have no problem with public ope-l archives. I don't think it
is a real problem if some folks withhold some or all of their posts (past
and/or future) from the archives, however. This happens regularly with
archival material, BTW--one has access to only the letter writer's side
of the correspondence, not the return correspondence of those to whom
s/he was writing.
I also recognize that people need semi-public space to ruminate, so that
ideas put out in posts should not be taken as indicating such a hard-
and-fast position as ideas in published papers. This definitely needs to
be made clear to users of the archives. But a similar thing already goes
on in conferences and draft papers. Like most other folks, I indicate
that papers are drafts only, and that the reader needs to obtain
prior (temporally prior, not logically or ontologically prior) permission
before quoting or citing. I think we should do something similar--no one
has permission to cite or quote any archival material without obtaining
the author's permission (and maybe Jerry's?).
So as not to inhibit those who don't want their ideas to be made public, I
think we'll have to specify explicitly that such and such a post IS for
public consumption--how about something like FPC at the start of the post?
All others are then excluded from the archives. With respect to past
posts, similarly, one must give explicit permission in each instance
before a post is included in the archives.
This is not as big a problem as it may seem. For instance, I hereby give
the subcommittee permission to place all my past posts in archives
(including one a few weeks ago in which I made a mistake that I'd rather
take back).
Andrew Kliman