[copyleft-next] Update 2012-09-08

Richard Fontana fontana at sharpeleven.org
Sat Sep 15 03:55:18 UTC 2012


On 09/09/2012 12:10 AM, Stephen Michael Kellat wrote:

>> Based on a discussion I had with Bradley Kuhn at LinuxCon about
>> clarifying the Harvey Birdman Rule, a patch from Bradley was merged.
> Harvey Birdman Rule otherwise known as disclosure of "ex parte
> communications"?

The Harvey Birdman Rule is related to the problem of ex parte
communication, though I wouldn't say they are entirely equivalent
concepts.

To a significant extent HBR is directed against lawyers. Applying the
principle that it is relatively acceptable to criticize one's own
guild, I would say that lawyers have some tendency to cause problems
when they get involved in FLOSS-related legal reform endeavors, at
least ones that are seen (correctly or [usually] not) as important.
Among other things, left to their own devices, they will quickly call
for application of the troublesome Chatham House Rule, find it
normative to pass around redlined Word docs as a method of
collaboration (this is after all what many of them do in their
day-to-day work), and will engage in what you'd call ex parte
communications with subsets of participants. However, to be sure, HBR
attacks a set of problems that is not limited to the involvement of
lawyers.

>> Finally, I have adopted MPL 2.0's approach in relaxing the requirement
>> to include a copy of the license text to "inform[ing] recipients how
>> they an obtain a copy". This was motivated by some recent discussion
>> on the OSI license-discuss list, and also by a conversation I had at
>> LinuxCon about a related issue.
> If possible, could this external discussion be summarized?  

The OSI discussion is archived somewhere on opensource.org (archives
of license-discuss). As for the LinuxCon conversation, I am not sure
the person I had the discussion with would want me to describe it
publicly. It had nothing to do with copyleft-next (thus keeping the
details private is not a HBR violation), but the specific issue is one
that I believe was noted by someone else in the license-discuss thread
anyway.

> I would
> strongly prefer to include the entire license text in an accessible
> fashion.  Creative Commons deeds, when the HTML snippets generated by
> their chooser tool, provide much the same access to license text in lieu
> of providing a copy.  See, for example:
> http://lisnews.org/listen_an_lisnewsorg_program_episode_210 &
> http://ohio.ubuntu-us.org/node/110
>> [snip]

I wasn't sure if you were talking in part about the desirability of
CC-style "deeds". I have mixed feelings about such deeds.

 - Richard




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