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Comment by mfer | Hacker News Reader

> user contributions licensed under cc by-sa 4.0 with attribution required.

I was just thinking about how everyone ignores the license for the code on SO. The code and way it's used is flawed.

For what it's worth, in the common user journey through SO (Google SRP to SO question page, scroll to answers), where does SO ever tell you about the license or the requirements of complying? If they simply rely on people knowing that generally there are licenses and such and they should look into it, then it's hardly a surprise almost no one complies. I've worked with many people, developers and not, who probably couldn't even rattle off a few common licenses.

I'm not a professional developer, but I've copied snippets from SO before. I've always included the answer URL in a comment next to it though. But mostly because if I ever had issues with it, I wanted to know where I got it and on the off chance anyone else looks at my code, I wouldn't want them thinking I wrote code I didn't write.

Common misconception: that licenses create requirements and reduce rights.

In legal reality if no license is attached to code you have almost zero rights to copy, use, or distribute it.

So if a casual browser of SO doesn’t see any license terms, they should assume that doing almost anything with the code is illegal.

It mean the user that asked the question cannot use the code of the answers.

No, it doesn't, because it is licenced under CC BY-SA.

It’s basically only time I would ever put a URL in the comment.

It’s a testament to SO that those URLs have still worked when I clicked on them years later and often provide valuable context to some esoteric bit of code.

Putting a URL in a comment still requires you to share the rest of your code does it not? The SA part of CC-BY-SA?

The rest of your code? IANAL but I don’t think it’s viral like the GPL.

The way I understand it, if you fix a bug in an SO code snippet, then in theory you own that bug fix back to the crowd.

EDIT: The more I read about this the more cringeworthy it becomes. CC BY-SA is not designed for source code. The language in the actual license is extremely imprecise for trying to reason about using modular bits of CC licensed code in a complex system.

“Adapted Material” is defined simply as;

Adapted Material means material subject to Copyright and Similar Rights that is derived from or based upon the Licensed Material

... and ...

in which the Licensed Material is translated, altered, arranged, transformed, or otherwise modified in a manner requiring permission under the Copyright and Similar Rights held by the Licensor.

Is my 100,000 LOC application “derived from” or “based upon” a function which converts a hex string to a byte[]? That’s a question that can only be decided in a courtroom, and to my knowledge CC BY-SA has never been litigated in the context of source code.

My inclination is that the terms “derived from” and “based upon” must necessarily carry a stronger meaning than, for example, “incorporates” or other similar terms which would not imply a central shared function or feature.

I think they should change it to MIT or BSD or CC0. I've put in my profile that all code I post is CC0. I don't want or need credit for explaining something and a 5 to 50 lines of code. Sometimes the code is longer but it's usually because it's setup for the actual important part. I don't really understand why people feel they need CC-BY-SA.

I really doubt that you could defend the copyright to a snippet like this in court. Saying it's CC BY-SA is all well and good, but if it's unenforceable in reality it's meaningless

I recently had the strange experience of writing a Promise.allSettled implementation in Node.js, but it wasn't quite working. I checked Stackoverflow and found an implementation that was almost line for line what I'd written.

I would imagine that's pretty common, especially for small helper functions for a very specific task. There might really only be one real logical way of doing it. How many different ways could you really implement leftpad?

Apparently whatever ended up in npm was shockingly horrible.

[The Error of Our Ways • Kevlin Henney] https://youtu.be/IiGXq3yY70o?t=1368

[slides, page 32] https://gotocon.com/dl/goto-berlin-2016/slides/KevlinHenney_...

Why don’t you think it’d be enforceable?

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