[Foundation-l] Licensing interim update

[Anthony]

On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 3:17 AM, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:

> Thomas Dalton wrote:
> > 2009/2/7 David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>:
> >
> >> Anyone can take any idiot question to court. That doesn't count as a
> >> reason to assume that there must therefore be a substantive reason to
> >> believe that the "or later" language doesn't apply. Nor does being
> >> unable to prove a negative.
> >>
> >
> > I don't understand what you are trying to say. Some people have
> > indicated that certain jurisdictions have laws against "or later"
> > clauses. Experts in the laws of these jurisdictions should be asked to
> > determine the truth.
> At the very least, it seems to empirically not be a problem. The GPL has
> included the "or later" language since it was first published in 1989,
> and has since gone through two updates (the first in 1991), without, as
> far as I can find, a single ruling invalidating that language. And
> GPL-licensed stuff has *much* more extensive worldwide commercial reuse
> than Wikimedia content does.
>

Surely there is a significant difference between an updated version of the
same license, and a license which says the work can be relicensed under a
different license.

In any case, the "or later" language has only been included on the edit page
since March 2007, and even then it has been hidden in the fine print.  You
claim that a company has a license to use a particular work under CC-BY-SA
3.0 just because the author hit "save page" on a website which years later
was altered to say "You irrevocably agree to release your contributions
under the terms of the
*GFDL*<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Main_Page&action=edit#copyright>
*." "GNU Free Documentation
License<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_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." and because GFDL 1.3 says "The operator of an MMC Site
may republish an MMC contained in the site under CC-BY-SA on the same site
at any time before August 1, 2009, provided the MMC is eligible for
relicensing."

Good luck with that.