It feels this thread has somewhat veered off the initial question. My position on this is non-purist, and perhaps more pragmatic.
SO licensing: - Their licensing is reasonable for what they are trying to do. Just as many social networks, they don't want somebody to suck up their (users') content, create a better UX, and steel away the traffic. Therefore, creating an archive of questions and answers from SO to an Apache mailing list is a *big* no-no. Apache projects should not subscribe notifications from SO to a mailing list, as it may be perceived as creating an archive. - We should -not- stress about whether SO is used by our contributors (to create contributions) and/or (its derivatives are) included in Apache projects. The whole project is not a derivative of SO, their posts are generic and often just a few lines, and the world would have to very different place before we'd be affected. We should just drop this tangent, and should not overwhelm our contributors with this. (To all purists out there, I'm sorry.) - We should -not- avoid SO simply because (some of) our users may be concerned with SO licensing. Let them worry about each channel and their consequences (if any). If they are worried about it, they'd probably use a different channel in the first place. My (personal) recommendation: - Embrace SO. Have a tag. Help people. Do engage with everyone wherever they may be. Recognize contributions, and all that comes with it. - Do -not- try to steer traffic towards or away from SO, and avoid adding barriers by forcing anybody to reach you in a different way (than they already have). - Do -not- try to create an archive of SO, but otherwise no need to worry about SO licensing in any other direction. On SO itself: They solved a pain point and they have lots of traffic (today). Great for them. Anything can happen in the future. They may start charging a subscription fee to read the answers. All answers may be lost -- who knows. Nothing should concern us here, as long as we don't try to steer traffic in any direction, and simply use their system to engage with our communities for our benefit. Hope this helps (to Superset and others). Davor On Sat, Apr 6, 2019 at 8:28 AM Ted Dunning <ted.dunn...@gmail.com> wrote: > Craig > > You are correct. I missed the distinction between their content and user > content. > > As you say, nothing on SO can be incorporated into Apache anything without > separate licensing. This is a good argument for redundant answers on Apache > mailing lists. > > > On Sat, Apr 6, 2019, 6:45 AM Craig Russell <apache....@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > > > > > On Apr 5, 2019, at 8:03 PM, Justin Mclean <justinmcl...@me.com> wrote: > > > > > > Hi, > > > > > >> Not by my reading. Contributions to the content are licensed to SO by > a > > grant similar to the way contributions to Apache are licensed by a grant. > > It's not copyright assignment, it's "just a grant. > > > > > > I believe they become a little more friendlier and it use to be that > > they did own everything but now it CC-SA licensed, but it looks like that > > non-commercial clause also applies? Either it's best to ask owners > > permission to use anything from there code wise that end up in an Apache > > project. > > > > I totally agree. By Apache standards, any code/documentation/thing posted > > there is not available for inclusion into a project unless we get > explicit > > permission from the owner. Just like anything you find by trawling the > > internet. > > > > Craig > > > > > > Thanks, > > > Justin > > > > > > > Craig Russell > > Member, Apache Incubator PMC > > apache....@gmail.com > > > > > > > > >
