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I think that the change is in general a good idea. I'm not a lawyer, and I assume most people that use Stack Overflow and other SE sites about programming aren't either. Licensing can get very complicated quickly, and removing ambiguity and fuzziness is a good idea. The Creative Commons licenses weren't meant for code, and that leaves some issues with how to follow them when reusing code from any Stack Exchange site. But I don't think this change goes far enough, there is still enough potential confusion left when copying code, or especially when you're not copying directly, but also rewriting it. This confusion might be mostly caused by my lack of knowledge in this area, but I guess most programmers aren't experts in copyright law either. In my completely irrelevant and non-lawyer opinion, a very large part of the code on Stack Overflow doesn't meet the threshold of originality required to be copyrighted. A lot of snippets are short examples on how to use a particular library function or language feature. There aren't many different ways to use the same API, so I don't think it makes sense that this could be subject to copyright. This is pretty much based on my opinion on how the law should work, not how it actually works, so I might be entirely wrong about the actual legal issue. If I would copy and paste a reasonably large piece of code directly, the rules are pretty clear, I have to attribute it. But what if I just copy it, and then play around with the code until I understand it? It might look pretty different afterwards, it arguably is a derived work and I should attribute it. What if the code is simply a short example showing how to use a particular function, do I really have to attribute that? But what if I read the code, look up the documentation of the involved feature, and then use that knowledge to write something that looks pretty similar, but I don't attribute because I didn't actually copy it? There's probably a good reason why people do clean-room implementations of copyrighted code, but once I've seen an answer on SO I can't unsee it. |
