On Sat, 16 Mar 2019 at 01:15, Giacomo <giacomo(a)tesio.it> wrote:
On March 16, 2019 12:58:46 AM UTC, Keith Z-G <keithzg(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Several lawyers came together, in GitHub private repos
>
>And indeed there seems to be no public record of this drafting
>process, at least not one that I could find. This seems diametrically
>opposed to much of the philosophy underpinning copyleft-next and its
>development, expressed in part as the Harvey Birdman Rule:
>https://raw.githubusercontent.com/richardfontana/hbr/master/HBR.md
Actually this surprised me too.
AFAIK these lawyers are all from the US and the HBR is an evident byproduct of US
culture: nowhere else people would forbid private reflection on a topic
Now, hold on there. Maybe there's some miscommunication here, and that
might well be due to some unclear phrasing on my part, but the point
*I* was making at least was that this other license being talked about
here does not follow the public drafting philosophy of copyleft-next;
apparently, unspecified lawyers drafted the Blue Oak license in
private git repositories, and are now throwing it over the wall. You
might argue that this is actually the correct way to draft a license.
You might even be right! But that isn't the spirit and principle in
which copyleft-next has been drafted, and so from that aspect alone it
would seem foolish to try and combine these efforts.
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?
(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.
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.)
(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!)
simply because we all know that such rule is:
- impossible to enforce (but I guess these days Google, Facebook and WeeChat are all
doing their best to setup a way :-D)
- easy to freely workaround (till Google, Facebook and WeeChat succeed).
Well of course; bad actors can always subvert processes if they want
to. I mean hell, copyleft, and even permissive, licenses, are violated
all the time around the globe, and often there's very little that can
practically be done to stop them. That doesn't mean we should just
give up on Free licenses altogether! (And if you feel that way, surely
this is not a worthwhile use of your time!)
And if we're (perhaps rightfully) worried about a future in which
centralized yet ubiquitous private actors like Google, Facebook, etc
have too much power, why would we not aspire to produce the legal
framework for software aligned against those interests in as
forthright and honest of a way as possible?
The HBR is just a form of intellectual surveillance that pretend to
produce trasparency.
I'm not entirely certain what you're trying to say here, although I am
sure I disagree.
In practice,
- it gives power to the best influencers, instead of the best arguments (who are the best
influencers these days)
- it blur the responsibility of their decisions that are described as collective
At least, if I write a license (or anything else) and propose it for public discussion, I
put my name and credibility at stake. I take risks and fully accept the responsibility and
the feedbacks.
Sure, and arguably that is what the Harvey Birdman Rule is trying to
do; everyone's contributions, arguments, and positions are up for
public discussion, rather than being made in secret and attributable.
Public collective drafting is just a process to preserve large group
interests without putting their lobbists on the front line.
If we're worried about powerful interests subverting our efforts in
the Free Software world and in the world in general, should not we be
all the more demanding of clear and verifiable arguments and
justifications behind proposed changes (to licenses, to software, to
laws, etc etc), so that as an interested public we can make informed
decisions and avoid being suckered into serving malignant interests?