Proposal: Adopt Harvey Birdman Rule

[Mike Linksvayer]

On 11/10/2014 10:28 AM, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote:
> Richard Fontana wrote at 02:13 (EST) on Sunday:
>> I'd like to propose that the copyleft.org project adopt the Harvey
>> Birdman Rule,

I'm about +0 as I suspect adoption might have very small net positive 
results but dislike both non-self-describing and pop culture referencing 
(obscurantist to me) names and vaguely feel the rule is less than 
halfway along spectrum from reactionary to theoretically grounded.

> IMO, the clear argument in favor of HBR is to avoid historical dangers.
> There is at least one other group who originally convened to disseminate
> information to the public about copyleft with the best of intentions,
> but then later closed up, excluded key community members and adopted a
> restrictive discussion rule, such as the Chatham House Rule (CHR).
[...]
> In practice in our community, the CHR has been manipulated in the larger
> Open Source and Free Software community as a tool to privatize
> discussion about important policy issues into closed social clubs.

I find it ironic that the above claims are vague and unreferenced, 
qualities I'd expect from a private-but-unattributed-disclosure-allowed 
regime, not from criticism of such a regime.

It is not clear to me how CHR "privatizes" discussion; the more 
fundamental issue seems to me that discussion is private to begin with.

But the snippet motivating my reply, possibly on-topic and non-meta:
> HBR is to copyleft
> what CHR is to copyright: a rule designed to use the system of private
> discussion rules to encourage transparent discussion.

I don't follow this analogy. HBR seems more like a decision by a project 
that all development within project is going to be committed to public 
repositories. It has nothing to do with regulating behavior of entities 
that don't directly participate in project, which is what copyleft does.

Mike