[Foundation-l] Projects without >FDL1.2 migration clause

[Delirium]

Erik Moeller wrote:
> I'm breaking this out under a new subject because it merits some attention
>
> On 4/6/08, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>>  - Some projects (I think all francophone, but I am not sure) are using
>>  strictly GFDL 1.2. It is not because they are generally not willing to
>>  switch to CC-BY-SA, but because of legal implications of "... or any
>>  later version..." in their countries.
>>     
>
> That's a very relevant claim that I haven't heard before. If this is
> true, it would obviously pose problems for those projects no matter
> what future changes we'd like to see to our licensing structure.
>
> Can someone confirm? If there is more than one project/language, we
> should begin building a list.
>   

What mainly matters is what the users are agreeing to (since we can 
change what *we* redistribute under as we wish, as long as it's some 
subset of what the authors have agreed to). On that, most of the 
Wikipedia languages unfortunately seem vague on what they're asking 
users to agree to when they edit.

Some examples, with decreasing clarity:

-- The English Wikipedia is explicit about it: the edit page itself 
requires the user to license text under the GFDL, with a footnote on the 
same page clarifying the conditions: version 1.2 or later, no invariant 
sections, etc.

-- The German Wikipedia on the edit page just says that the user agrees 
to license their contributions "unter der GNU-Lizenz für freie 
Dokumentation" without further clarification. If you click on the 
hyperlink for GFDL, it points to the copyright page which does have the 
additional "1.2 or later" verbiage in the explicit license grant. I 
suppose we could say the users are agreeing to this by reference, but it 
might be more solid if what they were agreeing to was actually on the 
edit page.

-- The French Wikipedia has the user to agree to license their 
contributions "sous la GNU Free Documentation License", and the GFDL 
phrase links to an *offsite* copy of the GFDL at 
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html, with no further clarification as 
regards versions, invariant sections, etc. If you do manage to end up at 
[[fr:Wikipédia:Droit_d'auteur]], there's still no explicit license 
statement at all, and definitely no "1.2 or later" verbiage.

-Mark