up vote 22 down vote favorite
5

I know this has been asked several times. I've read the responses. I'm still very confused.

What are the legal requirements for using samples from SO in other projects? If there are requirements, how should we go about removing them?

Case in point: a user who's question I answered was concerned about the cc license. I had to email him the solution to remove his fears of licensing. That's stupid, I don't want to give out my email address to work around legal issues.

So can someone at this organization clarify this is the intent? If so, what is a legally sufficient means of bypassing the license? One related answer suggested a profile message that source posted would be considered public domain and free of licensing. Is this sufficient?

Regardless of the answer above I'd like to make a recommendation that a 'Public Domain Content' checkbox be added for answers. Since I may pull code from an already public domain source the license does not apply anyway.

UPDATE

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/ that actually clears it up a little, my apologies for being a twit and finding this first. Most of my confusion comes from this question where the basic consent was to 'consult an attorney' which is IMO counter productive.

PS: I still think a "License Free" option for posts would be an ideal solution.

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"Public domain" is legally questionable in some countries. IANAL, but I thought copyright/CC fit into more countries legal systems than PD. – Craig Stuntz Oct 15 '09 at 4:01
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License mess?! Everything is CC-BY-SA. Isn't that clear enough? – Mehrdad Afshari Oct 15 '09 at 7:57
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CC-BY-SA is horribly restrictive and only slightly less worse than the GPL!! It should be Public Domain or BSDL only. – Theodore R. Smith Jan 18 '12 at 18:42

4 Answers

up vote 26 down vote accepted

I had to email him the solution to remove his fears of licensing

Maybe he's afraid of the monsters under his or her bed, too? Is this one user representative of the majority? Or any sizable contingent of the audience?

It's not a license mess, some people are a mess.

The footer says:

user contributed content licensed under cc-wiki with attribution required

The cc-wiki license seems pretty clear to me on this point: free to remix and reuse, as long as you attribute and use a similar license.

That said, a snippet of code falls under excerpt category and thus should be free to use under fair use. Heck, we don't even support giant masses of code being posted, so to me, by definition, everything would be an excerpt. We're not sourceforge, github, or codeplex.

I am not sure this is really a practical ongoing concern except for the truly paranoid.

Of course, just because you're not paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get ... your code.

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12  
All your code are belong to us? – alex Oct 15 '09 at 4:46
I added some simple (and not quite complete) jQuery code to www.civpro.ca to show the user the proper citation if they want to use the information in the questions/answers on that page. – Brian M. Hunt Oct 15 '09 at 12:50
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What if said user wanted to incorporate the code into a commercial application? The cc-wiki license doesn't have exemptions for small snippets--thus the possibility exists of a lawsuit. – NickAldwin Oct 15 '09 at 19:00
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up vote 16 down vote

CC-BY-SA is not an all-permissive license like the modern BSD type. It's much closer to the GPL, in that derivations have to be under a share-alike license.

For some programmers, this is fine. I work on internal software, so it really doesn't matter what Free/Open Source licenses we use. All we need is permission to use, modify, and distribute internally, and that's what we do.

On the other hand, some of us make money by selling software in the traditional sense, and CC-BY-SA isn't compatible with that business model. (I've had a couple of jobs like that.) Some of us work for companies with lawyers or managers who don't "get" free/open source software. (I've had some clueless managers.) In this case, anything short of a BSD-type license might frighten them.

Nor does the "excerpt" idea necessarily help. There is, as far as I know, no official lower bound of what is copyrightable, and there is not necessarily a right to use excerpts. In the US, "fair use" is in the copyright law, but again there's no actual definition: it's a judgment call that should consider several things. There's legal dangers with rewriting snippets also, in that it isn't clear what's a derivative work. All of these would potentially have to be decided in a court of law, and that's expensive.

So, there is a very real problem for individuals or companies that sell proprietary software and don't want to be in the position of having to defend what they include in court.

I think it would help if we had a handy BSD-type license we could slap onto code snippets as we wished.

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2  
It could be argued that an excerpt is a small amount of code that is showing a concept, which means that it's enough of a common structure as not to be either patentable nor copyrighted. You can't copyright the opening Dear sir or maddame, for the same reason. I'm still waiting someone to patent for(;;){} – perbert Oct 15 '09 at 14:53
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However, "it could be argued" is not good enough for a lawsuit-averse company, since the place where it would be argued is a courtroom. There's a saying that the only thing worse than winning a lawsuit is losing one. Much better to make sure everything is legally clear without resorting to anything subjective that could wind up in court. – David Thornley Oct 15 '09 at 15:48
up vote 10 down vote

Stack Overflow answers simply aren't big enough to be concerned about licensing. Here's how you (I'm using the general "you" here) can deal with it:

  1. Read the answer.
  2. Understand the answer.
  3. Implement a corresponding solution in your own words code.

Or, if you would prefer to copy the code verbatim and comply with the cc-wiki license, include a link to the answer in a comment in your source code.

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3  
..include a link to the answer asking them to up vote it :) – Amarghosh Oct 15 '09 at 13:52
up vote 0 down vote

See Re-using ideas or small pieces of code from stackoverflow.com also.

Furthermore, in regards "fair use", see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#Fair_use_under_United_States_law and some other interesting documents from the Australian government: http://www.copyright.org.au/find-an-answer/browse-by-letter/i/page-1/ - in Australia the term is not "fair use" but "fair dealing" btw: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_dealing#Australia

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