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Background
The impetus to create the Harvey Birdman Rule stemmed from three formative experiences: the quasi-public phase of the GPLv3 drafting process (January 2006--June 2007); the Project Harmony deliberations (ca. 2010-2011); and the ongoing activities of the European Legal Network run by Free Software Foundation Europe (ca 2007--present).
HBR is a critique of the Chatham House Rule, which governed Project Harmony for most of its life and has officially governed the activities of ELN since 2008, if not inception.
The name "Harvey Birdman Rule" was coined by Richard Fontana in an IRC channel conversation with Bradley Kuhn and others in (IIRC) 2012. The name is a reference to Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law. At least two post-hoc explanations for the naming have been given, but the real reason is a quasi-inside joke between Fontana and Kuhn, which Kuhn has probably forgotten and which wasn't really all that funny to begin with.