On 7/12/06, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/07/06, Oldak Quill oldakquill@gmail.com 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.
The GFDL allows any work to also be licensed under the GFDL, *or* any later version of the GFDL. This allows for small technical fixes ("oops, clause seventeen clashes with an obscure 1927 publishing law and means GFDL material can't ever appear on cardboard, better fix that comma and call it 1.3"), but (at least in spirit) means you can't just replace it with "GFDL 2.0" where clause one is "you must give Stallman lots of money", because that would be a different license entirely rather than an incremental upgrade.
Somewhere (I think it might be in the GFDL itself) is a clause that says that any future version of the license will be "in the spirit of" the original GFDL.