An HBR cure summary follows:
Over dinner yesterday evening, Fontana and I discussed his desire to do
a 0.01 release of the license. I argued that "releasing" the license
will signal that the license is usable, and it's not in a usable state
yet, and therefore should not be "released" in this way. Fontana
pointed out that the release would still say: "THIS IS A DRAFT. DO NOT
USE AS A LICENSE." at the top, and that he did *not* want people to use
the release.
I responded that the only point then in a numbered release was to get
press coverage. Fontana argued he didn't really want more press
coverage for copyleft-next.
I then speculated that Fontana perhaps wanted comments from people who
wouldn't otherwise participate in a mailing list, or follow the git
master branch, or otherwise get involved until they saw a release.
Fontana said that was nearly it exactly: indicating that he viewed the
"numbered releases" of copyleft-next as similar to what the GPLv3 called
its "discussion drafts".
I teased Fontana a bit about imitating a process that he is trying to
improve, and then pointed out that what he was saying was basically that
he wanted to invite feedback from people who can't otherwise participate
in the project in the way it's designed. I even argued that perhaps
this was a "spirit violation" of the HBR, since the HBR is precisely
designed to keep away lawyers and "policy wonks" that don't understand
enough about Free Software culture to join a mailing list, or at the
very least, read a git log and/or clone a git repository to see the
current draft. I pointed out that I believed the main value of
copyleft-next as a license design project is that it keeps away that
type of person who were the primary corrupting force for GPLv3.
I then asked if there were people Fontana wanted to comment on
copyleft-next that weren't *here* already, Fontana didn't really answer,
but I did point out that if such a person exists, it's easy enough to
send them a personal invitation to clone the repository and join the
list.
I believe this fully summarizes the only copyleft-next part of the
discussion and cures the HBR violation per HBR ยง2 (I am just now
proposing a pull request to number the HBR sections :). Fontana, if
I've misrepresented any part of the conversation, please correct.
--
-- bkuhn
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