Timeline for A New Code License: the Community Edition
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
59 events
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| Apr 13, 2017 at 13:00 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
replaced http://opensource.stackexchange.com/ with https://opensource.stackexchange.com/
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| Mar 20, 2017 at 10:31 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
replaced http://meta.stackexchange.com/ with https://meta.stackexchange.com/
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| Jan 19, 2016 at 19:44 | comment | added | Rodrigo Calix | @sampablokuper It depends of what code you are taking, and how much of your work means. | |
| Jan 19, 2016 at 17:52 | comment | added | user136089 | @RodrigoCalix, "the Shre (sic) Alike clause does not apply when we are talking about small snippets of code". Actually, it might well apply. | |
| Jan 19, 2016 at 17:27 | comment | added | Rodrigo Calix | @sampablokuper Yes i know the Shre Alike clause does not apply when we are talking about small snippets of code, but many users think that it does. Around 2-3 answers above this one, i provided a solution, where attribution could be required if the users want to, simple as that, you might be interested. | |
| Jan 19, 2016 at 17:08 | comment | added | user136089 | @RodrigoCalix, "The problem is the ShareAlike Clause". That's not a problem, it's a benefit. It protects against the tragedy of the commons. "CC BY-SA 3.0 is not recommended for software" SE contributors publish mixed content on SE. Sometimes that includes computer source code; often it does not. CC-BY-SA is a recommended kind of license for mixed content like this. CC-BY-SA is not ideal for entire software products, but SE contributors generally do not publish entire software products on SE. CC-BY-SA is therefore a suitable kind of license. Keeping it at 3.0 on SE minimises hassle. | |
| Jan 19, 2016 at 16:42 | comment | added | Rodrigo Calix | The problem is the ShareAlike Clause, also CC BY-SA 3.0 is not recommended for software, probably CC 4.0 is a little more rentable, but still the code works in a different way. | |
| Jan 17, 2016 at 17:56 | history | edited | user136089 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jan 17, 2016 at 17:51 | history | edited | user136089 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jan 17, 2016 at 11:35 | history | edited | user136089 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jan 17, 2016 at 1:09 | comment | added | user136089 | @ThomasOwens, "Dual licensing, given the current tools, is not feasible. ..." I agree dual-licensing is poorly supported by the SE UI at the moment. Let's address that issue here. | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 20:31 | comment | added | Thomas Owens | @sampablokuper Dual licensing, given the current tools, is not feasible. This was mentioned in one of the previous postings about the license. Putting a disclaimer in your profile is not obvious and clear to users and requires people to check their profile and is changable at any time without a record to allow people to determine what license they received the content under. Putting it in a post means that things can be added or removed by anyone with edit rights so posts would have to be policed (but there is a revision history). It's not a recommended approach. | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 20:27 | comment | added | user136089 | @ThomasOwens, "I know that I haven't been able to fully participate since I do not feel comfortable posting significant code in questions or answers due to the license." But you already said you like permissive, attribution-required licenses, so just dual-license under such a license. Whatever's stopping you, it didn't stop Guido van Rossum or Jon Skeet or Eric Lippert et al. Maybe they understand the licensing better than you do ;) "In both SE threads, my posts have been in the top 5 ordered by up votes - I'm not alone here." Even on SE, there are many irrational people ;) | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 20:22 | comment | added | Thomas Owens | @sampablokuper I know that I haven't been able to fully participate since I do not feel comfortable posting significant code in questions or answers due to the license. And I'm sure other people who have read and understand the license feel the same way. In both SE threads, my posts have been in the top 5 ordered by up votes - I'm not alone here. | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 20:21 | comment | added | user136089 | @ThomasOwens, "So now you want to explicitly exclude anyone who doesn't believe in strong copyleft and viral licenses from participating on Stack Exchange?" No. And all the examples you have given show that far from the current license excluding such people, they have instead been very enthusiastically and constructively participating! | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 20:12 | comment | added | Thomas Owens | @sampablokuper So now you want to explicitly exclude anyone who doesn't believe in strong copyleft and viral licenses from participating on Stack Exchange? I'd like to point out that Jon Skeet is an engineer at Google, Eric Lippert was on the Microsoft team that developed the Visual Basic, VBScript, JScript and C# compilers. Guido van Rossum created Python and was an engineer at Google and Dropbox. If you don't make it friendly for companies who operate in a closed-source environment to participate fully here, these people may not have been able to share their knowledge. | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 20:03 | history | edited | user136089 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jan 16, 2016 at 19:57 | comment | added | user136089 | @ThomasOwens, "So are you saying that if an engineer at Microsoft needs help and incorporates CC BY-SA code into the Windows kernel, then the whole Windows kernel code base should be released [in compliance with] CC-BY-SA?" Yes, obviously. And a good thing, too! But depending upon Stack Exchange contributions would be a sketchy business requirement for Microsoft if it also wanted to keep distributing Windows as proprietary software. If it wants the latter, it simply ought to pay its developers to write the necessary code. (Which it does, I believe.) | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 19:52 | comment | added | Thomas Owens | @sampablokuper So are you saying that if an engineer at Microsoft needs help and incorporates CC BY-SA code into the Windows kernel, then the whole Windows kernel code base should be released as CC BY-SA? Because that's exactly what you just said. The fact is that companies do have rules about what licenses are appropriate in order to protect their intellectual property. It appears that you have no understanding of how the software industry works, so you should go learn about that first. | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 19:49 | comment | added | user136089 | @ThomasOwens, "But that's not a business requirement." Well, in that case, distributing the product in accordance with CC-BY-SA should be fine :) | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 19:47 | comment | added | Thomas Owens | @sampablokuper But that's not a business requirement. CC BY-SA says that you must share alike. Meaning you must make your code available to recipients as CC BY-SA. | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 19:45 | comment | added | user136089 | @ThomasOwens, "Please explain why it is a "sketchy business requirement" to have an organizational policy to not release source code." I did not say that it was. (It might be, actually, but that's a different matter entirely.) It appears you did not follow the link. If you had followed it, you would have seen that I described it as sketchy for parties to "have an arbitrary business requirement to distribute code contributions from Stack Exchange sites, that they didn't write, in proprietary non-SaaS software." | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 19:34 | comment | added | Andy | Which is the point I believe you were making above, @ThomasOwens. Thank you. For a user to legitimately use SO for occasional help during work hours is not possible is the employer does not release code. CC-BY-SA is bad for private employers (or anyone who doesn't want to contribute a bit of code for others to use). | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 19:33 | comment | added | Thomas Owens | @sampablokuper Please explain why it is a "sketchy business requirement" to have an organizational policy to not release source code. Have you never worked in an environment that sells software products? Or software embedded into a hardware system (where releasing the source code would also reveal things about the hardware system)? Or have to be concerned with ITAR? It's not sketchy to have a policy to not release source code to anyone. | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 19:31 | comment | added | Thomas Owens | @Andy CC BY-SA has never been vetted for software. It doesn't talk about source code or the binary output of compiling source code. But, based on my understanding of CC BY-SA, if I were to take code licensed under CC BY-SA and incorporate it into a file, minimally that entire file would become CC BY-SA. Potentially, the entire software project would become CC BY-SA. That means I would need to release the source code for at least one file and at most one project. If that project is a library, you get into linking as well, which is also not discussed in CC. It's a whole can of worms. | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 19:23 | comment | added | Andy | You've said that before and I don't buy your argument. A programmer can have a legitimate question they need answered. What is the requirement of that user and their employer at that point? What does CC-BY-SA require of the entire code base when their problem is fixed using code from SO to their own question? | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 19:18 | comment | added | user136089 | @Andy, "This is bad for users that need help on a work problem. If they copy code from SE into their code base, now everything needs to be licensed to match SE's terms." That is bad for them only if they have sketchy business requirements, as I pointed both in my answer and in a previous comment above. | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 19:16 | history | edited | user136089 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jan 16, 2016 at 19:13 | comment | added | user136089 | @ThomasOwens, "I want the source code to be under a permissive license with attribution." I, too, would love the Stack Exchange source code to be under an open license (permissive with attribution would be way better than closed source)! But I don't think you mean the Stack Exchange source code, I think you mean the Stack Exchange content. Trouble is, it is heterogenous. My answer links to discussions explaining the difficulty of demarcating code from content. That difficulty has no solution in sight, and therefore your desire has no solution in sight. But you can still participate! | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 19:10 | comment | added | Andy | #4 - This links to your own answer, which in turn links to another answer, which has the first comment being "Are you sure?". Can you provide a slightly less biased source than your own answer on this? | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 19:08 | comment | added | Andy | #3 - This is bad for users that need help on a work problem. If they copy code from SE into their code base, now everything needs to be licensed to match SE's terms. You may have issues with SE (based on your profile), but others do not. They want help to a problem without being forced to share their entire code base because someone spent a few minutes to help them get through a tough problem. | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 19:03 | comment | added | Thomas Owens | No. I want the source code to be under a permissive license with attribution. That's it, plain and simple. A license that allows me to use code from Stack Overflow in any project regardless of license by providing appropriate attribution. I think that's a very simple thing and it's easy to do: All source code under the Apache, BSD 2-clause, BSD 3-clause, or MIT license without modifications made by the terms of use. | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 19:02 | comment | added | user136089 | @ThomasOwens, it seems you want the moon on a stick. I cannot help with that, and neither can Stack Exchange. | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 19:01 | comment | added | user136089 | @ThomasOwens, "If I can't use copyrightable code from Stack Overflow in my projects (at work or at home), then I'm being excluded." This is a little bit like saying, "If I can't take bits of the canvases home from the National Gallery for use in my own projects, then I'm being excluded." Er, no. You can still use those works in lots of other ways: get inspiration from them, study them, copy them for a reasonable range of purposes, and even contribute to the collection so that others can derive similar benefits from your contributions, etc. | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 18:57 | comment | added | Thomas Owens | @sampablokuper Yes, I can participate on Stack Overflow. I can answer questions and choose to either not share code or not share copyrightable code. However, if I have a problem and come across copyrightable code, not being able to use it is useless to me. If I can't use the code, that's exclusion - I'm excluded from being able to safely use the code. Why is it not safe? Because CC BY-SA is undefined for software, and once I separate code from text, the code is still CC BY-SA. | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 18:54 | comment | added | user136089 | @ThomasOwens, "If I can't use copyrightable code from Stack Overflow in my projects (at work or at home), then I'm being excluded." Nonsense. You can participate in Stack Overflow in a massive number of ways, including using copyrightable code from Stack Overflow in your projects at work or at home. If you then want to distribute those projects under incompatible licenses, then that's a different matter, but it does not in any way amount to being excluded from participation! | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 18:53 | comment | added | Thomas Owens | @sampablokuper I have when the most recent SE post was posted. I believe others have following the December post. So far, to the best of my knowledge, Creative Commons has not responded to anyone (they haven't responded to me yet). However, when it comes to the meaning and intent of Creative Commons licenses, if I find that CC says X and someone else says Y, I'm going to take X over Y, regardless of how sound Y may appear to be. | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 18:52 | comment | added | user136089 | @ThomasOwens, "Then go and get Creative Commons to respond" That is a rather unconstructive thing to say. I have given a rationale that accords with the license terms, which are canonical. Manifestly, I am not in control of Creative Commons. If you want them to respond to this discussion, please contact them yourself. | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 18:49 | comment | added | Thomas Owens | @sampablokuper If I can't use copyrightable code from Stack Overflow in my projects (at work or at home), then I'm being excluded. And right now, I can't use copyrightable code from Stack Overflow at work or in my personal projects. Therefore, I'm being excluded from fully utilizing the resource. Does that mean it's not helpful? No - the answers are still helpful in explaining concepts. But it's not feasible for me to share code in answers or even use Code Review (since I can't drop in answers in place of my code), | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 18:46 | comment | added | user136089 | @ThomasOwens, "Except you are..." That is a false claim; it is at odds with reality. Those sites have large, active communities of legitimate users who have manifestly not been excluded by the existing license. | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 18:43 | comment | added | Thomas Owens | @sampablokuper Then go and get Creative Commons to respond, because I'm basing my information on what is available to me from Creative Commons. If things are out of date, then they should update their content and guidance. First, The version of CC BY-SA that Stack Exchange uses is 3.0, which is not compatible with any non-CC license. And no version of CC BY-SA is compatible with GPL v2. Second, if I take a work that is CC BY-SA 3.0 and extract the source, I have a solely software piece that is CC BY SA, which is problematic per CC themselves. | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 18:41 | comment | added | user136089 | @ThomasOwens, saying "no non-CC licenses have been designated as compatible with BY-SA 3.0" is legally and logically distinct from saying "no non-CC licenses are compatible with BY-SA 3.0". The latter is false, the former is true. For the reasons given, I believe CC-BY-SA 3.0 to be GPLv3 compatible. If you disagree with that conclusion, please take up the matter on that thread instead of this one, thanks :) | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 18:38 | comment | added | user136089 | @ThomasOwens, "Creative Commons says that you should not use CC licenses for software". (1) The page you linked to is a wiki, not official guidance. (2) The bit of guidance you're referring to dates from before CC-BY-SA became GPLv3 compatible. (3) The bit of guidance you're referring to is concerned with works that are solely software, which is why it recommends "software-specific licenses". SE content is not solely software: it is heterogeneous, as I already pointed out to you. | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 18:38 | comment | added | Thomas Owens | @KevinBrown CC-BY-SA 3.0 is not GPL compatible. CC BY-SA 3.0 added words to allow relicensing under a compatible license. However, "no non-CC licenses have been designated as compatible with BY-SA 3.0". CC BY-SA 4.0 is compatible with the GPL v3 one way. | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 18:36 | comment | added | Thomas Owens | @sampablokuper Except you are, assuming they are playing by the rules. I think the issue is that there are a lot of people out there who want to play by the rules, but can't. Some (like me) are doing the right thing and not using SE content improperly. Others are probably doing the wrong thing and stealing the content. | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 18:33 | comment | added | user136089 | @ThomasOwens, "We should not be precluding a large amount of our audience due to the license terms." I entirely agree. And by keeping the existing license, we aren't (self-evidently!). | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 18:33 | comment | added | Thomas Owens | @sampablokuper And Creative Commons says that you should not use CC licenses for software. They recommend using an FSF or OSI apprived software license for source code. My understanding is that a CC license is appropriate for mixed content (text + source), but the terms are unclear and untested when it comes to isolating copyrightable source code from the combined work. | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 18:32 | comment | added | Kevin Brown-Silva | Note that CC-BY-SA 4.0 is directly GPLv3 compatible, and most people agree on that. I'm not sure about CC-BY-SA 3.0 though, this is the first time I've heard of it being GPLv3 compatible. | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 18:31 | comment | added | Thomas Owens |
@sampablokuper I would like to point out that Stack Overflow is for professional and enthusiast programmers and Programmers Stack Exchange is a Q&A site for professionals and students in software development and Mathematica Stack Exchange is for users of the software Mathematica developed by Wolfram Research (and Mathematica is often used in companies - people at work). We should not be precluding a large amount of our audience due to the license terms.
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| Jan 16, 2016 at 18:28 | comment | added | user136089 | @ThomasOwens, Stack Exchange has heterogeneous content. I don't think you bothered to read the whole page you linked. It says: "If your work is not being created for use with a particular software project, or if it wouldn't be appropriate to use the same license as the project, then we only recommend that you choose a copyleft license that's appropriate for your work. We have some of these listed on our license list. If no license seems especially appropriate, the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike [CC-BY-SA] license is a copyleft that can be used for many different kinds of works." | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 18:23 | comment | added | Thomas Owens | @sampablokuper Why shouldn't I be able to use Stack Exchange at work or in personal projects with non-copyleft licenses? Even the Free Software Foundation, who frequently advocate for strong copyleft, recognize that under certain conditions, their strong copyleft licenses aren't the best option to promote free software. | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 18:18 | comment | added | user136089 | @ThomasOwens, "Right now, I am prohibited from using copyrightable code from Stack Exchange in a project at work, as our policy is to never release source code." If yr policy is to never release source code, then it is right & proper that you should not be allowed to derive your products from Stack Exchange content. Otherwise, you'd be taking advantage of the four freedoms without reciprocating. Taking without giving back is sketchy as hell, & I'm glad you're prevented from doing it. | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 18:16 | comment | added | user136089 | @TariqAli, the content is freely usable subject to fair (i.e. reasonable) terms, exactly as I said. Those terms are stated in the license & accord with the point of the sites as described by their co-founder, see above. The only people whose free use of the content is prevented by the license are those with sketchy business requirements, as I also said. My argument is not only valid, it is sound :) | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 18:14 | comment | added | Thomas Owens | In order to maximize use of copyrightable code posted on a Stack Exchange site, no license with a strong copyleft is suitable as it precludes use in closed-source applications. Right now, I am prohibited from using copyrightable code from Stack Exchange in a project at work, as our policy is to never release source code and CC BY-SA requires that the entire work be released if combined. If I'm working on a personal project, my preferred license is Apache. I can't incorporate any copyrightable code from a Stack Exchange site into my personal projects. That's bad all around. | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 18:07 | comment | added | Left SE On 10_6_19 | If the code was licensed under CC-BY, then your argument may be valid. But the code is licensed under CC-BY-SA, meaning the resulting product must be distributed under the same license (or a compatible license). That suggest that only copyleft licenses are to be used, while permissive/proprietary codebases are prohibited from using this code. The content is not freely usable by everyone. | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 17:50 | history | edited | user136089 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jan 16, 2016 at 17:42 | history | edited | user136089 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jan 16, 2016 at 17:35 | history | edited | user136089 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jan 16, 2016 at 17:30 | history | answered | user136089 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |