New Cookbook / Licensing issues about cookbook

[jcubic]

There is this page https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing. But the law language is difficult (I had no issue with legal texts in my own native language Polish but for English, I have some problems with understanding).

The license is explained at https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing but also there is the Term Of Service and I think that they explain how to use a license if someone will want to copy the whole StackOverflow (this can be only done for personal and non-commercial purpose).

Maybe we should concat with some copyright lawyer so can look at everything and tell us what we can and can't do with the content.

[jcubic]

I think that I will ask on Meta StackExchange or maybe Law StackExchange.

[lassik]

Thanks for taking initiative with the cookbook.

The code examples should not use CC-BY-SA since that's not a known open source license. They should probably use CC0. CC0 is Public Domain, but with some extra text for countries where people can't donate work into the Public Domain.

If StackOverflow is using CC-BY-SA for the code, then thousands or millions of people may be breaking the terms of that license by copy/pasting code without attribution. CC licenses (other than CC0) are generally not recommended for code.

I don't have an opinion on the license for the explanatory text, but would CC0 work for that as well?

[lassik]

(I don't know why the old Scheme cookbook was LGPL, and how that license was intended to apply to code)

[jcubic]

The problem with CC0 is that we will not be able to use code from StackOverflow. I was hoped to search for some common problems and copy-paste the code and use the same license (CC-BY-SA).

[lassik]

Is there a page explaining how the StackOverflow license is intended to be applied? SA means "share-alike" which would imply that if you paste the code into a permissively licensed program (e.g. MIT or BSD license), the program changes to copyleft (similar to the GPL).

If the StackOverflow license does not apply to their example code, then we can copy that code into the cookbook no matter what license SO is using.

[lassik]

One lawyer explains it in this blog post: What is the license status of StackOverflow code snippets?. The result is very unclear. Nobody seems to know how to interpret the SO terms. I think it would be best to avoid this kind of confusion.

I skimmed the Terms of Service, and they talk about "Subscriber Content" which includes code. They say attribution is required for Subscriber Content.

I think we're going overboard if we require attribution in 5 or 10 line snippets copy-pasted into a program, and it makes the license of the resulting program unclear.

[jcubic]

I always give a kind of attribution to code snippets from stack overflow (usually using ref: <short url> in comment).

[lassik]

I asked @johnwcowan to comment since he has a lot of experience with open source licensing.

[soegaard]

Feel free to use recipes in the old cookbook under whatever license you want.

[lassik]

@soegaard Did you rite most of them?

[soegaard]

I wrote quite a few. My favorite is the one explaining do-notation.

Other names I remember: Noel Welsh, Neil van Dyke and Anton van Straten.
Mail me if you need their emails.

I don't know how many recipes are still relevant though - I think both libraries and coding style
has evolved since then.

[lassik]

@soegaard OK, seems each page in the cookbook lists the person/people who wrote that page. Neat!

We've been planning a dual-license or multi-license (possibly MIT/BSD/ISC/CC0) for the cookbook material to make it as easy as possible to copy code to a project without hassle. Would you be willing to release your pages under this license?

[soegaard]

Yes.