> Standards organisations are very easily corruptable when its members are allowed to have conflicts of interest and politick and rules-lawyer the organisation into adopting their pet standards.

FWIW, in my experience on standardization committees, the worst example I've seen of rules-lawyering to drive standards changes is... what DJB's doing right now. There's a couple of other egregious examples I can think of, where people advocating against controversial features go in full rules-lawyer mode to (unsuccessfully) get the feature pulled. I've never actually seen any controversial feature make it into a standard because of rules-lawyering.

What exactly are you calling "rules-lawyering"? Is citing rules and pointing out their blatant violation "rules-lawyering"? If so, can you explain why it is better to avoid this, and what should be done instead?

As an outsider I'd understand it differently: reading rules and pointing out their lack of violation (perhaps in letter), when people feel like you violated it (perhaps in spirit), is what would be rules-lawyering. You're agreeing on what the written rules are, but interpreting actions as following vs. violating them.

That's quite different from an accusation of rules violation followed by silence or distortions or outright lies.

If someone is pointing out that you're violating the rules and you're lying or staying silent or distorting the facts, you simply don't get to dismiss or smear them with a label like "rules-lawyer". For rules to be followed, people have to be able to enforce them. Otherwise it's just theater.