Peter Ansell schreef:
>
How long has "GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later
It used to be version 1.1... how many base
version changes are going to happen?
At least one: to a version of the GFDL which is compatible with a CC
license.
Note that this is entirely legal. An early contributor to Wikipedia
would have licensed his contribution as "GFDL 1.1 or later". This gave
Wikipedia the right to distribute unchanged and modified versions of
that contribution under any GFDL version larger than 1.1. With the
change in the Wikipedia license, we chose to only use part of the rights
granted to us: namely, those in GFDL 1.2 or later. That's an option
given by the original contributor.
Personally, I would have preferred to give our downstream users the
widest available choice of licenses: so GFDL 1.1 or later. WP chose
otherwise.
Note that those early contributions are still available under the GFDL
1.1. Wikipedia just chooses not to publicize that option. If a copyright
holder wants to do that, he can, for example by including a statement to
that effect on his user page. Such statements can only add licensing
options (such as dual licensing), not take away (for example by refusing
to release your edits under the GFDL; or by insisting on invariant
sections. People have been blocked for this).
It may be deemed to be intentionally misleading to unilaterally change
the set of allowed license versions without making it clear that some
contributions *and their future modifications* are clearly allowed to
be downloaded under version 1.1 as wikipedia is not given copyright
owner status in order to modify this clause. The idea of free
information shouldn't stop people from always using a single license
to their materials and modifications of their materials.
What were the major changes between 1.1 and 1.2 that wikipedia deemed
necessary to change the entire license over btw?
Peter