[Wikipedia-l] Marketing: a question

Wed Jul 12 20:07:22 UTC 2006

Oldak Quill 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.
>  
>
You're right, we're not stuck with the current GFDL.  This isn't 
explicitly a feature of the GFDL, but is a result of the way people 
usually license their work under the GFDL, which is intended for exactly 
this sort of issue.

The en: Coyprights page states our license as follows:
"Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document 
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or 
any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no 
Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover 
Texts."

So if the FSF published a Version 1.3, third parties could at their 
option choose to comply with that license instead of the current Version 
1.2.

-Mark