Re: can Wikipedia apply "CC-BY-SA-compatible FDL" retroactively?

At 12:39 PM 8/10/2008, Francis Tyers wrote:
>How can the updated FDL be said to apply to > that work if the 
>authors didn't agree to it? Doesn't the licence text say "GFDL 1.2 
>or later" ? "Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify 
>this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, 
>Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software 
>Foundation;"

Ah OK, that makes sense.

By the way, that means that if authors are submitting content to 
Wikipedia, with the intention that nobody would be able to create a 
derived work from their article and slap "all rights reserved" on it, 
those authors are putting a lot of trust in the Free Software 
Foundation, aren't they?  Since the FSF might someday release a 
version of the FDL which allows third parties to create derivative 
works published under "all rights reserved", like CC-BY does.  (Not 
that the FSF is ever likely to do that, obviously, but it's still 
unusual to have an agreement that one party can unilaterally change 
at any time in the future.)

         -Bennett