On 02/04/2008, Peter Ansell ansell.peter@gmail.com wrote:
Technically if you obscure the fact that previous contributions were made under version 1.1, then you are saying that you don't consider any to be available under 1.1.
Nop we just don't consider the issue of which were under 1.1 to be of import.
Wikipedia doesn't have the right to change the "or later" clause to suit its purposes really. It is accepting contributions under a perceived contract and it should put them out under the same.
It does
If any user could reinterpret contracts like that than a future version may be produced which may not suit an author who wanted to stay with version 1.1 or 1.2 and it is not up to wikipedia to say they can't, or imply they can't.
The author can do what they like with their work but as part of releasing it under 1.1 they agree to updates
On the other hand, there is the possibility that wikipedia could say they are offering all content under a single specific license, and not "version or later", and they would seem to be fine.
No we wish to see that or latter clause used.
It is only the bumping out of old versions that worries me as the author could still legitimately download a copy of the information under version 1.1 if it was derived from before the license bump. It is actually pretty simple to figure out, a simple check to see whether the contribution was made before wikipedia changed to 1.2 should be sufficient.
Nope. The derivatives are under 1.2 or latter only not 1.1
The text at the bottom of the page with a reference to another page which adds conditions is still quite unclear to me. If the following were at the bottom of each page it would eliminate the necessity to go to another page to discover that the license linked on the page contains an optional restriction which wikipedia uses.
Err that other page wouldn't be the edit page by any chance? The restrictions are mostly of interest to editors so it would appear logical to mention them on the edit page
"All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation
License version 1.1 or later with no invariant sections."
It isn't true though. Why are you so attached to 1.1?