[Wikipedia-l] Marketing: a question

Wed Jul 12 17:42:58 UTC 2006

On 12/07/06, Oldak Quill <oldakquill at gmail.com> wrote:
> There's something I've never understood about our use of the GFDL. I
> assume it is not the case that we are stuck with whatever version of
> the GFDL was around in September 2001? There must be some kind of
> provision in the text of the GFDL to automatically update the license
> to the latest version, am I right? If this isn't the case then we're
> as far from GFDL 1.3 as we are from CC-by-sa.

The GFDL allows any work to also be licensed under the GFDL, *or* any
later version of the GFDL. This allows for small technical fixes
("oops, clause seventeen clashes with an obscure 1927 publishing law
and means GFDL material can't ever appear on cardboard, better fix
that comma and call it 1.3"), but (at least in spirit) means you can't
just replace it with "GFDL 2.0" where clause one is "you must give
Stallman lots of money", because that would be a different license
entirely rather than an incremental upgrade.

Essentially, we're stuck with the general terms of the license, but
(because we're a massive, massive user and thus have clout) we're able
to work on the details a little.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk