And actually, if you do so, you violating copyright laws. If there is no explicit licence mentioned, the code is actually simply posted under a personal copyright of the author.
This is important if you use that code somewhere in production...
Wow, I actually searched the page once for license information a couple of years ago. Did that change (I guess not)? Plus, we had some OSS legal consultant that told us, SO falls under copyright laws and we must not copy/paste anything because of legal issues...
So, thanks a lot for correcting my statement, that’s very important!
You may find our article about Stack Overflow code snippets in GitHub projects interesting, which has recently been published in Springer's Empirical Software Engineering journal [1]. Beside some information about Stack Overflow's license, we report on an online survey with developers about their awareness regarding Stack Overflow's licensing and its implications (spoiler: they are often not aware of the implications). I also wrote a blog post [2] summarizing some of the results.
Huh, ich just read the license:
BY -> Attribution required (This is actually not that easy, license material is created automatically in our company, you would need to store and use that information)
SA -> Share alike when modified (This seems to be an issue)
Correct me if I am wrong, but doesn't it actually prevents commercial usage in a proprietary piece of software?
I think it depends where you use it. Anything trivial (a line or two) I think is basically fair game (notwithstanding things like the true binary farce, etc.)
If it's a function and you're doing more than change variable names then you should credit the author and share changes, but you don't have to open source your whole application.
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re: Do you copy and paste code from Stack Overflow? VIEW POST
VIEW FULL DISCUSSIONNo I use the concepts.
And actually, if you do so, you violating copyright laws. If there is no explicit licence mentioned, the code is actually simply posted under a personal copyright of the author.
This is important if you use that code somewhere in production...
From every StackOverflow page (bottom right):
See also the accepted answer for Do I have to worry about copyright issues for code posted on Stack Overflow? on the meta.
Wow, I actually searched the page once for license information a couple of years ago. Did that change (I guess not)? Plus, we had some OSS legal consultant that told us, SO falls under copyright laws and we must not copy/paste anything because of legal issues...
So, thanks a lot for correcting my statement, that’s very important!
Sebastian Baltes has a couple of links about this below that I thought were interesting:
You may find our article about Stack Overflow code snippets in GitHub projects interesting, which has recently been published in Springer's Empirical Software Engineering journal [1]. Beside some information about Stack Overflow's license, we report on an online survey with developers about their awareness regarding Stack Overflow's licensing and its implications (spoiler: they are often not aware of the implications). I also wrote a blog post [2] summarizing some of the results.
[1] rdcu.be/8irZ
[2] empirical-software.engineering/blo...
Huh, ich just read the license:
BY -> Attribution required (This is actually not that easy, license material is created automatically in our company, you would need to store and use that information)
SA -> Share alike when modified (This seems to be an issue)
Correct me if I am wrong, but doesn't it actually prevents commercial usage in a proprietary piece of software?
I think it depends where you use it. Anything trivial (a line or two) I think is basically fair game (notwithstanding things like the
truebinary farce, etc.)If it's a function and you're doing more than change variable names then you should credit the author and share changes, but you don't have to open source your whole application.
I think, anyway.