To be honest I find more annoying HBR 3 than HBR 4.
At least HBR 4 is enforceable, HBR 3 is not.
So I suggest to remove HBR 3 instead (or maybe remove both 3 and 4, if
you prefer).
Indeed HBR 3 does not make the government of a project any more transparent.
It just grant to leaders the control on the project's narrative.
Giacomo
On 14/04/2019, Richard Fontana <fontana(a)sharpeleven.org> wrote:
> Last week I had a few conversations with Bradley Kuhn about
> copyleft-next and the Harvey Birdman Rule [0]. I understand Bradley
> planned to make one or more HBR cures based on those conversations. I
> am here pre-empting him solely as to the HBR conversation, just
> because it's fairly simple for me to explain.
>
> We were talking about HBR and I pointed out that the name Harvey
> Birdman Rule is kind of obsolete or increasingly obscure.
>
> Some background: Harvey Birdman Rule is a reference to the cartoon
> series Harvey Birdman, Attorney-at-Law [1] which ended in 2007. In the
> past (once on a Free as in Freedom episode, and I believe once on this
> mailing list) Bradley provided explanations of the choice of the name
> for the governance rule that originated in connection with the
> copyleft-next project. These explanations were, as I recall,
> ingeniously creative but had the character of ex post justifications.
> In terms of its naming, at least, HBR was meant to be a reference to
> and parody of the Chatham House Rule, which experienced a brief period
> of popularity in certain free software-related circles around
> 2009-2010 or so. I think the original choice of Harvey Birdman may
> have mostly had something to do with the fact that there was a
> memorable lawyer involved in the GPLv3 process named Jim Harvey [2],
> but if so the connection was really only as loose as this: that Jim
> Harvey was (way before the launch of copyleft-next) a representative
> member of the open source lawyer establishment -- he was co-chair of
> one of the four GPLv3 discussion committees -- and that coincidentally
> his surname matched the forename of the memorable cartoon character
> Harvey Birdman.
>
> Anyway, whatever the situation was in ~2012, today Harvey Birdman is,
> probably, more obscure as a cultural reference. I am also not sure
> that the humor in Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law has itself stood the
> test of time.
>
> So Bradley and I discussed the desirability of renaming the Rule. The
> best approach is to fit a new expansion into the existing HBR acronym.
> The auditory similarity of the expansion to Chatham House Rule -- the
> original element of the joke -- ought to be retained; that is, the
> expansion should be of the form [word1] [word2] Rule.
>
> The best Bradley could come up with was Hindering Backchannels Rule. I
> couldn't come up with anything better. I think this is better than
> Harvey Birdman Rule.
>
> Bradley also suggested that HBR should be revised to eliminate the
> attempt to disincentivize top-posting of mailing list replies (see HBR
> 4). It's now clear that if only for reasons of generational cultural
> change, the battle against top-posting which I suppose began in the
> early days of the Eternal September is now completely lost. Recall
> that HBR had already been revised to soften the prohibition on
> top-posting. [3]
>
> So anyway I support Bradley's suggestion that (a) Harvey Birdman Rule
> be renamed Hindering Backchannels Rule, and (b) HBR 4 be deleted.
>
> Richard
>
> [0]
https://github.com/richardfontana/hbr/HBR.md
> [1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Birdman,_Attorney_at_Law
> [2] Now at Alston & Bird. See
>
https://www.alston.com/en/professionals/h/harvey-james-a
> [3]
>
https://github.com/richardfontana/hbr/commit/1fa933b2953cc70d76a28e74d889...
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