Although I haven’t signed up to do the official review, I was looking at python-meshio[1], and I found that it contains a function substantially derived from a StackOverflow answer[2]. While I’m impressed that upstream cared enough to give credit, this leaves me with a question.

Normally I would suggest that, to be strictly correct, the license of the copied-and-modified snippet should be added to the package’s License expression. But all answers on StackOverflow are, depending on when they are posted[3], licensed CC-BY-SA-2.5, CC-BY-SA-3.0, or CC-BY-SA-4.0. In this case, the applicable license is CC-BY-SA-3.0[4].

All of these licenses are listed as allowed in Fedora for content, but not for code. Strictly speaking, then, this appears to be code under a not-allowed-for-code license. At the same time, it is hard to believe that prohibiting packages containing snippets from StackOverflow would be an intended outcome.

Since code copied or heavily inspired by StackOverflow answers is extremely widespread, and the only thing that is perhaps unusual here is that proper attribution is present, I’m curious how cases like this *ought* to be handled.

– Ben Beasley (FAS: music)

[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2283539

[2] https://github.com/nschloe/meshio/blob/b2ee99842e119901349fdeee06b5bf61e01f450a/src/meshio/stl/_stl.py#L49-L83

[3] https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing

[4] https://stackoverflow.com/posts/8964779/timeline

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