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Some people have pointed out that e.g. “the GNU libc doesn’t become MIT because I traced through it on SO”. This is true, you obviously can only licence content where you have the permission to do so. However, including such information on SO posts is still necessary; this is just as true currently though, so there needs to be an amendmend to the ToS that it’s fine to post content one does not own as long as it’s under an OSS licence. As things currently stand, HostileFork admittedHostileFork admitted what’s basically violation of the ToS by posting content where he doesn’t have permission to post it under CC-Wiki.

Some people have pointed out that e.g. “the GNU libc doesn’t become MIT because I traced through it on SO”. This is true, you obviously can only licence content where you have the permission to do so. However, including such information on SO posts is still necessary; this is just as true currently though, so there needs to be an amendmend to the ToS that it’s fine to post content one does not own as long as it’s under an OSS licence. As things currently stand, HostileFork admitted what’s basically violation of the ToS by posting content where he doesn’t have permission to post it under CC-Wiki.

Some people have pointed out that e.g. “the GNU libc doesn’t become MIT because I traced through it on SO”. This is true, you obviously can only licence content where you have the permission to do so. However, including such information on SO posts is still necessary; this is just as true currently though, so there needs to be an amendmend to the ToS that it’s fine to post content one does not own as long as it’s under an OSS licence. As things currently stand, HostileFork admitted what’s basically violation of the ToS by posting content where he doesn’t have permission to post it under CC-Wiki.

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mirabilos
mirabilos
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(I should probably plug the full terms there; had to do so for opencaching.de (on which I put my geocache listings under those terms as well) have requested I do that and add a German translation as that site is also used by many people who don’t speak English… which I did.)

This allows authors to choose more free licence terms for their posts (of course I’d be able to exclude individual postings, and postings in which I posted content that’s not mine, such as GNU libc excerpts), but preserves the copyleft-and-attribution-requirement of the general site.

This allows authors to choose more free licence terms for their posts (of course I’d be able to exclude individual postings, and postings in which I posted content that’s not mine, such as GNU libc excerpts), but preserves the copyleft-and-attribution-requirement of the general site.

(I should probably plug the full terms there; had to do so for opencaching.de (on which I put my geocache listings under those terms as well) have requested I do that and add a German translation as that site is also used by many people who don’t speak English… which I did.)

This allows authors to choose more free licence terms for their posts (of course I’d be able to exclude individual postings, and postings in which I posted content that’s not mine, such as GNU libc excerpts), but preserves the copyleft-and-attribution-requirement of the general site.

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mirabilos
mirabilos
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Reasoning

I don’t think this is a good idea.

Background

I’m a BSD developer myself, so I’m normally happy with putting things under BSD/MIT-style licences, but there are two big things that go against BSD spirit there:

The exception from reproducing the licence ☹

This is really bad, as attribution is all a BSD developer usually gets (and, occasionally, patches to the eMail INBOX). It also creates a “net” licence by itself, the problems with which others have already pointed out.

So, if you’re going to switch to MIT, use MIT, not MIT with some exception.

What is code?

I’m a very big fan of putting everything under the same licence, be it code, data, documentation, etc. so I cannot help but disagree with distinguishing between “Non-code contributions” and “Code contributions”. In addition, someone has to decide what is what, and that usually falls to judges, and we all know things just go down the drain when lawyers are involved.

This means:

All three bullet-points you stated are against the spirit of those who use MIT-style licences in the wild the most.

Other problems

Some people have pointed out that e.g. “the GNU libc doesn’t become MIT because I traced through it on SO”. This is true, you obviously can only licence content where you have the permission to do so. However, including such information on SO posts is still necessary; this is just as true currently though, so there needs to be an amendmend to the ToS that it’s fine to post content one does not own as long as it’s under an OSS licence. As things currently stand, HostileFork admitted what’s basically violation of the ToS by posting content where he doesn’t have permission to post it under CC-Wiki.

My own solution

I’m okay with the current situation, where the entirety of the post is published (harmonically) under a weak copyleft licence, but where I have the following snippet on my network profile:

I hereby offer all content I author on the SO/StackExchange network also under The MirOS Licence (HTML version with less WTF-8) in addition to “cc-wiki” (CC-BY-SA 2.5 or 3.0, depending on the SO/SE network site, apparently). I urge everyone else contributing here to do the same.

This allows authors to choose more free licence terms for their posts (of course I’d be able to exclude individual postings, and postings in which I posted content that’s not mine, such as GNU libc excerpts), but preserves the copyleft-and-attribution-requirement of the general site.

And everyone who does take content of mine under The MirOS Licence will note it also has a requirement to retain full attribution and licence terms (all three of copyright statement, terms and discaimer), while permitting inclusion in other works.

Circle back to harmony of code, data, documentation, media content, etc: this licence specifically uses the term “work” instead of “code” while otherwise being a mostly standard BSD/MIT/HPND-style licence. This is precisely to facilitate putting everything under the same licence terms.

What SO/SE should do, IMHO

  • Stop this hurried action
  • Add some wording to the ToS about excerpts from works one does not own (permit it as long as the work’s under some OSS licence), as that’s as much a problem with the current terms as with the new proposed ones
  • Rethink, read community feedback
  • Possibly allow opt-in or even opt-out (per (site, not network) account) to use a permissive licence but do not waive the notice preservation requirement for them
  • Allow opt-out of the permissive licencing for individual posts

This makes it fine for sites such as Code Review to continue operating on the current terms (it’d probably qualify for opt-in) while still permitting you to put e.g. SO under an opt-out scheme for more permissive licencing terms (with more advance notification, this time).

I do hope any changes to the terms such as these would be prominently featured in a to-be-acknowledged page the first time anyone posts after they go live, right?