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Use Code From Stack Overflow? You Must Provide Attribution (stackexchange.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Have you ever used Stack Overflow to answer a question about some code you're working on? Most people who write code on a regular basis have done so, and this sometimes involves copying code snippets. Well, starting on March 1, copying code from Stack Overflow will require you to attribute that code. Code published by contributors to SO will be covered by the MIT license. Users copying that code don't have to include the full license in their code, as it usually requires, but they do have to provide a URL as a comment in their code, or some similar level of attribution. This change applies to other sites in the Stack Exchange network, as well.
The SO community is widely criticizing the change, citing problems with the decision-making process that led to it and complications that may arise from mandating attribution. Why did SO make the change in the first place? They say "it's always been a little ambiguous how CC-BY-SA covers code. This has led to uncertainty among conscientious developers as they've struggled to understand what (if anything) the license requires of them when grabbing a few lines of code from a post on Stack Exchange. Uncertainty is a drag on productivity, for you and for us, and we feel obligated to make code use more clear."
The SO community is widely criticizing the change, citing problems with the decision-making process that led to it and complications that may arise from mandating attribution. Why did SO make the change in the first place? They say "it's always been a little ambiguous how CC-BY-SA covers code. This has led to uncertainty among conscientious developers as they've struggled to understand what (if anything) the license requires of them when grabbing a few lines of code from a post on Stack Exchange. Uncertainty is a drag on productivity, for you and for us, and we feel obligated to make code use more clear."
If I offer you some code in an answer, that's for you. I'm not going to require you credit me or some site for the few fucking lines that would come through on stackoverflow.
So instead of dealing with that bullshit, I just won't use stackoverflow again.
Fuck them. Fuck their CoC. Fuck their SJW bullshit, too.
This is way to complicated, and nonsense. How can you copyright solutions to problems that some may find themselves and others pick up from SO. This kind of appropriation of public resources is typical for the fossil fuel bank dominated economy that needs to get into every fucking nook and cranny to eek out some fossil fuel cashflow. I say : Fuck that.
You should be anyways, but not for the reasons that you might think.
I always include a link in comments to the source of the borrowed code (or approach), because the relevant discussion will illuminate the how and why far better than a large block comment.
I usually put the URL into a comment when I use a particular piece of code from Stack Overflow. More so for future reference than attribution.
It is anyway best practice to give your coworkers a clue where to find more information for that fix/workaround/implementation they stumble upon...
Nobody will come after you if you use code from Stackoverflow without attribution. The code isn't worth enough and the ownership is not obvious enough.
People and companies that have a policy of sticking to the spirit of a licence agreement as well as the letter will appreciate having some rules to know that what they're doing is acceptable.
Here's an actual debate on this topic on SO:
http://meta.stackexchange.com/...
Accepted answer: Anything that you post to Stack Overflow will be under the terms of the Creative Commons license
Top comments seems to be about using "Unlicense" (instead of "Public Domain") and to just avoid cut-paste (good luck with that if you're dealing with an offshore team). I pretty much use #2, renaming everything and usually swapping some of the decision logic to create something that looks original enough to pass a smell test when I cut/paste. It's work, but it's still significantly less work than writing it from scratch.
This. I'm moving all my queries to expertsexchange.
Law writers DGAF whether something is actually practicable, including but not limited to Imaginary Property scenarios. We're half a page away from back to back articles about Netflix admitting that geoblocking is basically impossible, while convincing their shareholders otherwise.
The reason we don't have Thoughtcrime is the outrage you get from various political parties/groups, not the fact that we don't actually have a mind reading device.
This is about money and maybe ego. A combination of what some shortsighted idiot thinks of as free advertising and maybe some ego-hungry folk involved in the decision-making who feel the need to be cited.
And it will start moving every major company away from stackoverflow. You can't be putting snippets of other people's code in your product with attribution because you're going to be making lawsuits and licensing that much more complicated. People who worry about those things will use stackoverflow less and less.
Stackoverflow has a great network effect from all the users. But stuff like this will make anyone who brings another game to town look a lot more attractive.
The same code snippet gets recycled, munged, riffed on, ported to new languages, rewritten by multiple authors, commented on and then improved, reposted by new authors with bug fixes, and on... The whole value of sites like SO is this kind of sharing. But doesn't that mean attribution, especially for smaller snippets, will become a nightmare?
For me it always came down to what kind of code it was. If it was "I know what I want to do, what's the right/best way to express that in $LANGUAGE / using $FRAMEWORK?", we're talking about just mechanics. If I was looking for how to do something, where I needed the actual algorithm or data structure rather than just "What's the syntax?" or "Which operator's best?", that's getting into the creative side where you need to at a minimum do attribution. Almost all of what I get off of SO falls into the first category.
Hell no. You'd have to cut off my balls before I would do that.
This. I'm moving all my queries to expertsexchange.
Is this the site where you post all your gender identity issues?
I get really frustrated when searching for an answer and about 15 or 20 of the results are from sites that have just screen scraped Stack Overflow and republished the content in a "forum" style post. So yeah, even Stack Overflow doesn't have any control over the content.
I'm not opposed to including links to some of the more obscure answers, but for more common code that could have been found in numerous other sources, I don't see the point.
Hell no. You'd have to cut off my balls before I would do that.
That would be amateursexchange.com.
...that if they require this, it is edging towards some kind of implicit acceptance of responsibility for that code.
If I use code from a forum, offered freely, and burn down my stuff, it's on me.
If I use code from a paid source and it burns down my stuff, it's on them.
If I use code from a forum, but I have to attribute that code in mine, then ???
I would dismiss that conclusion right off the bat. But you give some lawyers even the slightest rationale, it's off to the courts you go.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Perhaps it's because I'm an academic and my use of Stack Exchange relates to my research projects, but I'm having a hard time understanding why people would object to citing the source of a snippet of code. I have always cited and linked to the profiles people who were kind enough to help me with my code on Stack Exchange, not out of license obligation, but out of professional respect.
In academia, citing the work of others is commonplace. It's super easy to insert a comment in your code with a link. Putting the licensing and legal interpretations aside for a moment, why wouldn't you just want to do this out of respect for another professional?
Reply to This Share Flag as Inappropriate
many of the code solutions are already plagiarized from books and blogs... SO needs to handle proper citation before it could enforce such a policy.
[nt]
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
99.999999% of the code posted to StackOverflow didn't originate with the person who's posting it.
Most of it is just someone spitting out what they learned from someone else, and in most of the situations, the most upvoted answer is the common sense and only real solution to the problem presented, thats why it gets voted to the highest/accepted as the answer.
SO doesn't really have the right to force a license on the code posted there, they are pretending to worry about people using the code, but ignoring the broken part of the people posting the code.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Welcome to the future.
They just want the link to drive more traffic to their site.
Who owns the code posted to Stack Overflow?
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
When I post code on Stack Overflow, I intend for other people to use it. I couldn't care less if I have attribution, I'm just trying to be helpful. I suspect that this is intended to get more traffic to Stack Overflow.
This doesn't sound onerous to me at all. It doesn't require anything in public documentation, help pages, or otherwise like the MIT license. It simply requires a single URL in a code comment.
This sounds perfectly fine to me--in general, I and my team already does this because it's helpful to know WHY we chose a course of action, especially when it was complicated enough to require SO's help.
http://meta.stackexchange.com/...
What is reasonable attribution?
A URL as a comment in your code is reasonable attribution.
There are certainly other forms of reasonable attribution, depending on use, and you are welcome to go above and beyond what’s required and include username, date, and anything else if you like.
You are also welcome to use the MIT License as it is traditionally interpreted: by preserving the full license with relevant fields (copyright year and copyright holder) completed.
-=Lothsahn=-
In many cases, there is only one correct way to do a thing. This is similar to Google's argument regarding Java APIs: if you want to write compatible code, there is only a single way it can be done. It isn't creativity, it's plain mathematical necessity. Many of the people didn't write the language interpreter they are providing an answer about, so they have no rights to claim in answering trivial syntax questions (no more than a person can claim Rights to a section of Harry Potter because they discussed it on a forum). If the answer involved writing a complex algorithm, then yes, an argument can be made for attribution. I think common sense is sufficient to tell the difference.
Of all of the problems plaguing SO, this attribution crap is the least important of them.
The awful moderation is by far the biggest problem. It's so frustrating to ask a perfectly good question, get some good answers to it, and then later on some micropenised moderator comes along and starts muddling with the questions and answers just to make himself feel like his micropenis isn't as small as it is.
Moderation online just makes things worse. Doesn't matter if it's SO or Slashdot or Wikipedia. Most of the time it's just an outlet for people with microscopically small genitalia to try to feel bigger and more important than they really are. In reality, they're just freaks with shrunken genitalia who have no value at all.
Summary says " Well, starting on March 1, copying code from Stack Overflow will require you to attribute that code"
Actually, copying code from Stack Overflow ALREADY requires you to attribute it. The posters own the copyright, you can't copy without permission, and the only permission that applies to ALL Stack Overflow content is CC BY-SA.
Now, individual posters may give permission to copy without attribution. But the default rule has been CC BY-SA since the site opened, and the BY in CC BY-SA stands for "byline". Read the license for the full details, but attribution is very much required under the status quo.
If someone posts a way to call Java library routines, is it copyright?
Ask Oracle.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Before you freak out, you should read the license that's been in place on Stack Overflow since it was founded.
Guess what: it requires attribution.
It's not totally clear how that's supposed to work when applied to code, but it's crystal clear about the requirement itself. The proposed MIT change is aimed at making this more obvious, but... If you aren't already giving credit where it's due, then that's on you - the license has always demanded that.
You might wanna read up on the "share alike" bit too...
P.S. I work for Stack Overflow.
I want all my relevant online contributions to be considered public domain. Ironically, the sites where I write (StackOverflow or Slashdot) can apply their more-restricted-copyright policies (a different story is people respecting such decisions).
Note that I have updated my SO profile description to include all these ideas: http://stackoverflow.com/users...
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
The objection is not to citing others when you use their code: the objection is to the way Stack Exchange is requiring you to license your code. The most repeated theme of the criticism is "If you're going to change licence, change to a proper one rather than a kludgy homebrew variant which allows people to just copy the code, add a URL, and call it attribution".
It's about SO trying to more eyes on the site and raise their ad revenue further.
"Hmm, where did the dev get this code? Oh, I see, from SO. Let me go to the link and see what else was said..."
Anyone who buys that "we're only thinking of the code submitters' rights" crap is just fooling themselves.
I've never considered myself a programmer but I code. I've always looked for guidance on how to behave in the community. Without weighing in on the ethics and/or practicalities of SO insisting we do this, it seems to me a trivial/polite/useful thing to do. I, for one, will start doing this.
I put the 'Physics' in 'Physical Attraction'
I can't believe all of the hate for this. It's not a big deal and it's something I've always been doing anyway.
Sure, it's probably not a big deal to you. But it is very much a big deal to people who write commercial software, which is a fair percentage of the people who use StackOverflow. I'm not a lawyer myself, but I can say from experience that, when a lawyer finds a comment somewhere in the codebase that says "//these next two lines of code are MIT-licensed", steam shoots out of their ears and every developer in the company has to attend an all-day meeting about it.
@attributions
- The C Programming Language 2nd Edition
by Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie
for help on the printf statement.
- Linux man-pages project for parameters to the
strftime function.
- Professor Steve Sherman for the first class using C.
- Professor John Wirth for general programming
skills being taught.
- Bill Joy for developing the vi editor in which this
code was produced.
*/
When I write up a code snippet to answer a question on a website, I get to decide how I want to license that. Not the website... And almost this exact argument has gone to court, BTW - Adobe can't claim any rights whatsoever to Photoshops just because their creators used an Adobe product to make them. Call me crazy, but somehow I doubt the courts would consider the use of a text input box to write a forum post as granting more rights to the tool-maker than they do with Photoshop.
And when I write up a code snippet to answer a question on Stack Overflow, I consider it completely public domain. I give up any and all rights to that code. Go grab it and "Hello World" your little heart out without giving me a lick of credit.
Now - Whether or not that now violates SO's ToS, yes, SO can decide that it does and ban me from contributing. But they don't get to tell me how I copyright my own created works (aka "posts").
The irony - someone complaining about "dumb" "dickheads" and screwing it up in the process. Good jerrrrrb!
And professionalism. Then again, most programmers aren't professionals so the whining is not unexpected.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I don't like gotcha arguments and I see what you're saying, but hate crime is not thought crime. It requires an element of thought but is inextricably linked to an act which in itself constitutes crime. It's akin to, if not the same as the different degrees of murder, which depend largely on the thought element bound to the act. Also akin to but further from than the former, the difference between murder and manslaughter where the differentiator is intent or lack thereof.
A thought crime in common parlance is the criminalization of thinking a given thought (holding a particular opinion) as such. We are approaching those, may G-d protect us, but we aren't there yet.
I'm not a lawyer myself, but I can say from experience that, when a lawyer finds a comment somewhere in the codebase that says "//these next two lines of code are MIT-licensed", steam shoots out of their ears and every developer in the company has to attend an all-day meeting about it.
This is absolutely common for many large commercial companies. I have several such companies as clients and getting any FOSS approved is a major process. In fact, one client preferred to send a check to one open-source project for a license even though legally it grants them no benefit. The project's website even says that the project "is in the public domain and does not require a license." Companies with large bankrolls will glady shell out thousands of dollars for some peace of mind.
http://www.hwaci.com/cgi-bin/l...
As a rule, I never used code directly from SO to avoid any licensing questions for my clients.
Perhaps it's because I'm an academic and my use of Stack Exchange relates to my research projects, but I'm having a hard time understanding why people would object to citing the source of a snippet of code.
I take the opposite position - I wonder why people even bother with attributions for little scraps of paper, half-formed ideas, and answers to questions.
For one thing, if it's on StackExchange it's common knowledge. Do you cite Newton or Euler when you solve an integral in your paper?
Secondy, StackExchange doesn't cite *their* scraps of code. That 6 lines of code that connect to the SQL server - it's just information from the manual that the reader could have gotten for themselves. Does StackExchange cite the manual?
Thirdly, it generates fear and doubt in the minds of pointy-haired bosses, thinking that an external license reference will dilute the software value. Possibly require the company to publish the code for anyone else to copy. (Whether this is true is irrelevant - it's the perception of many people.)
Fourthly, the attribution is extra administrivia and work that adds nothing to the code. It has to be ignored and skipped over by everyone who reads or maintains the code in the future, it goes into backups and changelogs. It's litter for programs.
Fifthly, there's no possible way that value or esteem can attach to the writer. Having some sort of value or utility is the reason that rational beings do things, so why should anyone bother doing something that could not possibly reward the writer?
Perhaps it's because I've read too many papers that are a thicket of cryptic citations referencing everyone else's work, but with very little to add. For example, see Crumbum and Whoodle (1985), but Finnaster and Welsch (1992) take a counter position that might throw more light on the subject.
For a relatively complete overview of the theory and reasoning behind citations, see Finbum.
When I copy code from StackOverflow, if it's more than one or two lines, I include a reference to the source page. If only so the programmers who work on my code after me know where it comes from and why it is the way it is.
no, I don't have a sig
A snippet is not a big enough fragment. Also who takes code 1:1?
This. I'm moving all my queries to expertsexchange.
Why? What will happen if you don't? Are the source code attribution police going to come by and arrest you? You know what I'm going to do in response to this? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. We Americans have become far too accustomed to doing what we're told like good little boys and girls. Whatever happened to ignoring or getting around stupid rules and laws? Our grandparents and their parents did it, why don't we? In America anyone can sue you or your company at any time for any reason. Being a perfect bootlicker isn't going to change that. The chances of costly consequences arising from failing to attribute a line of code from SO is so low as to be unworthy of even a minute wasted thinking about it.
>> I'd have second thoughts about employing a programmer who passes off other people's work as his own.
Then you probably don't know what programmers DO. What I think you are looking for instead are "artists." :)
For westlake and others new to the industry, please understand that all programmers do, all programmers EVER do, is take other people's work in the form of hardware, operating systems, libraries, other programs, and pass it off as our own through...da da dum...programs! Programmers who constantly choose to write their own stuff from scratch (also called "reinventing the wheel") are regarded as "slow", "obtuse", "dangerous" and "expensive" (have you tried hand-coding a web app from scratch these days?) while programmers who adopt best practice libraries, platforms, development practices and patterns are regarded as "fast", "smart", "effective" and "cost-efficient".
... I can say from experience that, when a lawyer finds a comment somewhere in the codebase that says "//these next two lines of code are MIT-licensed", steam shoots out of their ears and every developer in the company has to attend an all-day meeting about it.
And if they later find out that the same code from the same source was included without any such comment, do you think they would take that any better?
The MIT license, at least, doesn't require anything beyond attribution in the code. Up to this point the default license for anything copied from Stack Overflow was CC-BY-SA, which is "viral" much like the GPL: any derivative works must be offered under the same terms.
Of course, there is still the question of whether S.O. has the right to apply this license to everything posted to their site, including not only posts from before this policy was announced but also code from other sources with licenses which are not compatible with the MIT license or with S.O.'s interpretation of the attribution requirement.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Perhaps it's because I'm an academic and my use of Stack Exchange relates to my research projects, but I'm having a hard time understanding why people would object to citing the source of a snippet of code.
Because nobody really considers a trivial code snippet to be anyone's property. Code snippets are incredibly trivial pieces of code, akin to a couple sentences in a book. Do authors cite every idea they get from strangers, no matter how trivial? "Thanks go out to that loud obnoxious guy on the 2 bus at 2am on Saturday the 23rd of April 2015 who I based the character of Douchebag Dave on". Of course not.
for copyright. Therefore the license and their requirements aren't relevant.
So,
you "copy/paste" code from the internet and never did attribute/mention the original author?
And now a web site makes it a requirement in the "terms of usage" that you do so?
And: you never figured before hand that this is
a) the polite thing to do
b) the fucking law
c) in every damn book where people "quote" something "under fair" use for "science" or "educational purpose" the author is mentioned (otherwise it would be no fair use anymore), but if you copy/paste from SO or similar you don't think it would be appropriated?
No, I did not lose a closing bold tack somewhere.
How can it be so hard to be a "so called artist" and to grasp that sources should be mentioned?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I don't know how many times I've seen piss poor code upvoted as the correct answer. Sure, most of the time it works but will have obvious errors, poor coding, men leaks, etc. In almost all cases I end up rewriting the code anyway.
How about the people being fired from jobs or getting jail time for twitter posts? There's an actual Canadian who disagreed with a feminist on Twitter, and do to cyber violence harassment law (or whatever they call it in Canada) the guy was tried, convicted, and had jail time.
Hate crimes are thoughts put into action. It's no different from first degree murder vs. manslaughter. To convict for First degree murder you need to prove intent and planning which are both "thought crimes" the way you define it. The only difference is that a hate crime is an interpretation of motive and intent.
We are the 198 proof..
have you tried hand-coding a web app from scratch these days?
That was my hobby project for last weekend. I had trouble getting the strong nuclear force to condense from electroweak, then I divided by zero and the whole thing gravitationally collapsed! It took me a few hours to get the dark matter out of the carpet. I'll give it another try this weekend. I'm not certain if I should keep going with 11 dimensions or try with 9, but my problem is probably a set of fundamental operations in the number theory I'm using that gives division by zero a logically consistent value. I'll try again with infinity as an asymptote instead of a value and let you know how it goes!
"In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." --oblig
The short version is that the company doesn't care who wrote the code, they care who owns the code. All work for hire is copyrighted by the company, having who wrote it in source control is just to aid the development process or place blame. That means everybody can grab any piece of source and do whatever, very rarely do you see inside sources mentioned. Once you have code that is not yours and not distinctly separated in a third party library as being someone else's you have to keep track of it. What if another coworker needs part of the same thing and copies half of it - not including the comment? What if you want to sell or sublicense the code, what part of it is yours and not? If the person writing the code is from Cuba, is there any import/export regulation issues? I seem to remember some crypto projects not accepting US contributions for that very reason. If your code is somehow going to end up at SpaceX, is it okay if part of the source code driving the rocket comes from China?
If somebody compares your source code to StackExchange, will there be unattributed code? And does that mean it was copy-pasted from that source from them, legally taken it from some other source or perhaps even yours is the original that somehow made it's way there. Companies are fairly indifferent to professional courtesy, but they're strongly opposed to license administration and legal liability costs, at least for a small snippet of code. If your employees wrote it then it's yours and that's the end of it. This also mandates that there's a system and guidelines in place so people know what they can and can't do and the overhead of maintaining the policy and training developers so they don't grab anything in source form with no regards to the license. Which some will do anyway, which is why you try to set up controls and gatekeepers so they don't. In short if you have any kind of process involved the overhead is going to eat up any savings you had going to StackExchange in the first place. And 95% of it is like finding the right place in the manual...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It's akin to, if not the same as the different degrees of murder...
Except with hate crimes, there are usually two charges: one for the the actual crime and a second for the thought (hate).
have to know the detail of that charge. when I was on grand jury i noted that there can be multiple charges for the same act. I strongly doubt that even in that second charge there is no mention of the act. that very distant from a pure thought crime, no?
I agree with you 100% that there are social thought crimes. I though we were talking about legal crimes.
I think that the loudest objections to this are coming from people who feel that what Stack Overflow is requesting here is not unlike a computer science department in a university stating that all examples that their professors may write on the blackboard are copyrighted by them, and any use of those examples outside of the classroom must be attributed or they may get sued for copyright infringement.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Maybe SO should require their own cadre of geniuses to attribute their submissions/answers - which themselves are scraped from W3C, wikipedia, etc. Or the questions that are "self-answered" - just so said person can answer a question...
SO is implicitly claiming rights in the code posted by its users. I'd check their terms of use.
Authors of the code snippets who understand that (regardless of ideology) this is not practical for most people who code for a living... can just re-post a link to their code as a gist, pastebin etc with an MIT / BSD / WTFPL license.
For those wondering about derivative license compatibility issues: remember that as the sole author you have the right to use as many licenses as you like unless exclusivity is part of your job/contract. I don't think Stack Overflow can force this requirement on a user without breaking their rights in most countries.
Do you cite Newton or Euler when you solve an integral in your paper?
Actually you are required to do that for every single math task in a math test in university.
So I really wonder where you have studied that you think otherwise.
Apropos of nothing, when you took your test, who did you attribute when you used integration by parts?
You might mention "step 3 follows from Jenson's inequality" or other reference, but in general one doesn't attribute the step as much as explain the step.
You're confused. Identifying the reason behind each step is distinctly different from attribution.
I'm having a hard time understanding why people would object to citing the source of a snippet of code.
They are embarrassed that they had to look up the answer on Stack Exchange and don't want other people seeing the code to know. Personally I don't care, it shows I saved time by no re-inventing the wheel, and provides a helpful reference back to discussion and notes that might be useful later.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
... if I pull code or a solution from an Internet source, I always include the attribution. I don't do it for the author's benefit. I do it because it can be helpful to someone else reading my code in the future.
Evolution: love it or leave it
I don't cite my college professors when I write code. To me on Stack Overflow we are teaching each other. If I teach somebody how to do something, now they know, and they can go do it. I don't expect them to cite me. Of course I'm not gonna complain if somebody wants to cite me, give me an award, send me a check, etc.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
I figure if I had to go to Stack Overflow for something, it's likely something that some future reader (or myself) may want more context/explanation on, and the Stack Overflow discussion generally contains a lot more than whatever snippet I happened to take. So I tend to include the URL in a comment.
It's where he posts all his queeries.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Stack overflow ceased to be relevant to professional developers long ago, around the same time it became full of students asking others to do their home work.
This compounded by the problem, where those inexperienced student types up vote answers provided by the 'personalities' and 'celebrity coders' whether talking sense or not.
JustAnotherOldGuy posting from work....
1) Prove that my code snippet came from Stack Overflow instead of someplace else. Go ahead, prove it.
2) Prove that my code snippet actually originated on Stack Overflow instead of someplace else.
3) Prove that I didn't write the original code snippet, which was then copied to Stack Overflow by someone else.
4) Prove that my one-liner in perl, php, java, C++, C#, javascript (or any other language) has never been written before by any other person in the history of the world.
5) Prove that Stack Overflow hasn't instituted a policy that is basically IMPOSSIBLE to enforce in any meaningful way.
5) Prove that Stack Overflow isn't being run by a bunch of self-important jackoffs.
Given their existing policies to encourage posters to copy solutions from external sources rather than linking to them, I don't think 'professional respect' is the motivation for SO.
It is about in bound links, eye balls and advertising profits.
I've updated my profile on SO with:
Every post I make to Stack Overflow is explicitly released to the Public Domain and may be used without restriction. The license of the author in every case supersedes any blanket license of a service provider.
I'm not a programmer but I've gotten way in over my head on this one program I'm developing (music generating software). I'm constantly using code from all over the place and I attribute it and provide license information for all of it. I don't know what's considered trivial or what any other relevant laws are so I make sure I am always covered. And if I can't find licensing information about some code then I search elsewhere for a solution. Since this one big project is my entire life I want to make sure every single little i is dotted and t crossed. If this makes it easier for me to use code from SE then great with a clear conscience then great!
Well thanks for the notification. I'm now somewhat attentive to this. As for me, for all of the code I've submitted, I've never expected to attributed, and I'm not sure how this is even useful let alone enforceable. I'd say from the perspective of both a user and contributor to SO, that while though it's nice to have what you write noted elsewhere, the advantage of unencumbered ideas as provided by SO (and thus google) overwhelms any sort of benefit to strict conformance to some license. I'd like to think whatever gets proposed now can be undone once more of us become aware of this issue.
If they implement effective geoblocking, someone will just create an "Uber for foreign Netflix viewers" proxy. At that point it really will become impossible to enforce, because Netflix can't tell what's happening to the data after it reaches a US-based household.
Update: January 15, 2016 Thank you for your candidness, patience and feedback. We're going to delay the implementation for now - we'll be back soon to open some more discussions.
So it's not been taken off the table, but it probably won't happen anytime soon.
Citing the original source of snippets in the source code is fine, and is actually pretty useful, because when somebody goes and reads the source later, it helps explain why somebody did something. It also gives the creator credit in front of people who would actually appreciate and understand why their snippet is cool.
Citing the original source of snippets in a closed-source app is more problematic, because it tells the end user absolutely nothing other than that a tiny snippet of code exists somewhere in the application, and it is unlikely that the user perceives any benefit from that snippet, making the attribution largely a meaningless gesture. And the snippets are usually too short to enjoy copyright protection anyway, making citations legally unnecessary. But those attributions do make it (at least slightly) easier for someone to copy the functionality of those closed-source apps; if that were desirable, the original author would have published the source code to begin with, so from that perspective, resisting any unnecessary attribution makes a lot of sense.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I have ALWAYS put urls in my code that points to things. Even if I didn't copy and paste the code, but if I learned something that was super important, or how something is super stupid, or why something is super bad. Dump the URL in there to instantly resolve myself of all blame. "Learned it here, suck it."
SO is not academic papers. It's short answers to short questions. Do you credit every single person you learned everything you've ever learned from?
Me: "Hi Celest, How's it going?"
You: "Hi Greggman (I learned Hi from my Mom at 2 and Greggman from Gregg on the internet). It's going pretty good (I learned contractions is 1st grade from Ms. Smith. Going I learned from Mom when I was 3. Pretty I learned from my Mom as well. Good too).
Siting a multi-thousand word academic paper is vastly different than attributing 1-10 line code snippets from SO.
mylist = [1,2,3]
for item in mylist:
print item
#http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4170656/for-loop-in-python
#attributable to bukzor, but thankfully it's CC, I'm glad he did it for us
It's where he posts all his queeries.
So does he favor homo-genius or hetero-genius hardware?
~X~
We all put in answers where we can freely with no such restrictions and this is a ridiculous idea that none of us will abide by.
Example code, code snippets etc. -- basically all code on SO -- effectively constitutes a recipe. Recipes have been ruled non-copyrightable. Therefore code on SO is not copyrightable, and in the public domain.
In fact, one client preferred to send a check to one open-source project for a license even though legally it grants them no benefit. The project's website even says that the project "is in the public domain and does not require a license." Companies with large bankrolls will glady shell out thousands of dollars for some peace of mind.
Hey, do me a favour and see if there's anything useful for them on my Github repos!
https://github.com/dotancohen
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
I almost never use "found" code verbatim. Usually I have to rewrite it to fit into my project, not to mention remove the assumptions the original author baked into it in the first place. At that point I've changed it so much it becomes a derivative work. But, I *always* provide attribution in my source code by linking to the URL where I found the code snippet. Not to give the author their moment of fame, but so next time anybody looks through my code they know where I got that weird function and can visit the site to see the discussion. So at the end of the day, what I'm doing is called documentation, and anybody who *doesn't* do that should be smacked for being an idiot, not for breaking SO's silly rule.
I've always done that - if I copy any code from somewhere else, I add a comment saying where I got it from. Not because I feel like I need to legally, more because it's *helpful* - it's helpful if you come back a year later, and you're like, I don't remember writing this code? Oh, right, I didn't, I got it from somewhere else. It's also extra-helpful if the reason for the revisit later is because you think there might be a bug - first thing to do is go check the original source, see if the bug was already fixed. And of course, it is also polite to give proper credit, even if nobody is going to see the source other than your coworkers.
The reference to the Canadian issue was actually the result of laws in Canada against harassment. So in at least one case it was a real law that led to a "thought crime."
And you are only playing with words :)
What one guys attribution is, is the others guy explanation.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.