On Sat, Mar 16, 2019 at 4:00 AM Keith Z-G keithzg@gmail.com wrote:
At least as I comprehend it (and now I'm definitely going to be speaking purely from personal opinion), copyleft-next is largely a response to the GPLv3 and trying to improve upon *that* license, and one aspect of that is in trying to make the development process of copyleft-next as open as the development process of the sort of Free Software projects that might adopt such a copyleft license. In a sense, the effort here is to draft a successor (hence -next) to the GPL version 3 that keeps even more true to the spirit behind the GPL than any previous copyleft license.
Or to turn it around: why *shouldn't* the drafting process of a license be as open as the development process of the software that is to be licensed under it?
That is all correct. As I recently said in a thread on the OSI license-discuss list, I now am much more skeptical than I once was about the value of software-development-oriented tools for creating software *licenses* (if not non-software works in general), but I continue to believe in the value of public development of free software/open source licenses. Indeed I said this when someone asked me recently about the Blue Oak license: "new putative FOSS licenses should be drafted in public and collaboratively, not in private as I gather Blue Oak was" (https://twitter.com/richardfontana/status/1104811186665721856)
(And certainly, the Harvey Birdman Rule is in direct opposition to the Chatham House Rule, which is by no means unpopular with U.S. lawyers.
HBR is certainly a response to (and parody of) CHR. I actually suspect that the vast majority of US lawyers have no idea what CHR is.
In fact, it would seem to be that the U.S. based lawyers that drafted the BOML are working under some equivalent rule, if not that rule exactly.)
I assume they are working in total (collaborative) secrecy to the same degree as any other collaborators using a private GitHub repository.
(Also: the HBR does not at all forbid "private reflection on a topic"! Rather, it insists that any *discussion* on a topic, when substantive to the process of the actual development of the license, should be made public. It can even be made public retroactively!)
Yes, as illustrated by some past "HBR cures" involving conversations between me and bkuhn. Ah, those were the days!
Richard