The year is 2018…
… and the economy is in a slump. Pundits on CNN are attributing the decline to a lack of growth in the computing sector. According to the Alyssa P. Bitdiddle, senior analyst with the Society of Innovative Computer Programmers,
This has been a disaster in the making since March 1, 2016, a day that will live in infamy. That was the day when lawyers were invited into the software development process. Ever since Stack Overflow Inc. declared that all code snippets should be licensed as code rather than treated as knowledge, there has been a fundamental shift in programming culture. "Intellectual Property" lawyers throughout the industry have had a field day looking for violators. Nearly every software company outside of Somalia, Chad, and North Korea is vulnerable. By my estimates, software development productivity has dropped to pre-Stack Overflow levels. The average developer quality has declined as well, as programmers aren't putting their code up for review anymore. Software companies now spend a majority of their budget on lawyers, and they simply aren't hiring.
How did we get there?
Despite a top-voted analysis that said, basically, "Please don't do this", Stack Overflow staff billed the feedback as "highly positive". This ignored the fact that some people upvoted the question because they thought that licensing was an important issue that deserved attention, rather than because they agreed with the proposal.
I think we've learned our lesson this time. This question has been downvoted off the front page of Meta.SE. Is that a clear enough signal? If not, then what would constitute the "showstopper" that you require?
What did people say last time?
Key points from the previous round were:
- What exactly is the problem that the proposal aims to solve?
- We're sharing knowledge, not code.
- Permissive license is inappropriate for questions.
- Permissive license is inappropriate for Code Review, Programming Puzzles and Code Golf, and most sites other than Stack Overflow.
- License fragmentation is an administrative nightmare.
- Administrative overhead of licensing has the potential to break the Creative Commons culture and our Stack Exchange communities.
- What is the status of pre-transition snippets that get edited after the new policy?
- If code that appears on Stack Exchange is treated as licenseable, can we discuss code for which we don't have the right to relicense?
- Is there a threshold of originality before the MIT license kicks in?
- A crayon license is legally unsound, logically inconsistent, and perhaps unenforceable.
- Attribution is important to many of us.
- If you are serious about license enforceability, attribution and transitivity are essential to cover second-generation copies.
- What exactly did OSI say about the proposal, and how did they miss the legal unsoundness that was so obvious to many of us?
- For a permissive license, CC0 or WTFPL may be more appropriate than MIT.
- If there is a second license, then code should be dual-licensed, not permissive-licensed.
- What constitutes "code"?
- Is permissive-licensed code visually distinguishable from the rest of the content?
Out of all those issues, this revised proposal addresses approximately three. Even if this were a good idea (which I think it isn't), it would still be a half-baked idea.
What "code" are we talking about?
@MarcoAurélioDeleu has pointed out the absurdity of requiring attribution for short snippets. If you're using Stack Overflow as a resource to start learning some programming language, it would be as if you, as a tourist, had to give credit to your foreign language phrasebook for every utterance you made. Yes, the phrasebook is copyrighted. No, you are not allowed to reproduce the book. But using the book for its intended purpose is just not a copyright or a licensing issue. I you string together the lookup results for "Hello", "My stomach hurts," and "Where can I find the bathroom?", that's fine. If the book's appendix has a sample cover letter and you use it to apply for a job, that's fine too, even though the appendix is a non-trivial creative work.
Does this licensing proposal apply to the Stack Overflow documentation project? If so, you might as well kill that project now. Who would want to use that documentation resource if it meant you had to cite all the example code from it?
Do reasonable (i.e. non-troll) Stack Overflow contributors actually post original works worthy of licensing? My impression is that Stack Overflow answers are either going to be short enough that the answerer is giving it away as free advice for no-strings-attached usage, or it's substantial enough that it's going to be hosted on GitHub under the author's own terms.
So, what problem, exactly, does the proposal solve? By declaring code as subject to licensing, aren't we just feeding the trolls?