According to the footer on every StackOverflow page, all submissions are under the copyleft cc-wiki with attribution required license. CC licenses are specifically not recommended for software. (¹)
[Insert favorite legal disclaimers here.] An ultra-conservative/pessimistic interpretation of the "remix" and "share alike" portions of the cc-wiki license (yes, just the human-readable summary) would prohibit use of even ideas expressed on the site without licensing the result under "the same or similar license" -- imposing restrictions incompatible with many open source licenses, let alone closed-source development.
Several meta threads at StackOverflow have pointed out this issue, resulting in a lot of discussion about fair use/excerpts, snippets, re-implementation, etc.; some users have even begun putting an additional license for their contributions within their profile.
I may actually be in violation of the attribution requirements due to an inability to direcly link the StackOverflow user's name to the associated profile.
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[ 6.3 ms ] story [ 15.1 ms ] threadhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/ http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions#C...
[Insert favorite legal disclaimers here.] An ultra-conservative/pessimistic interpretation of the "remix" and "share alike" portions of the cc-wiki license (yes, just the human-readable summary) would prohibit use of even ideas expressed on the site without licensing the result under "the same or similar license" -- imposing restrictions incompatible with many open source licenses, let alone closed-source development.
Several meta threads at StackOverflow have pointed out this issue, resulting in a lot of discussion about fair use/excerpts, snippets, re-implementation, etc.; some users have even begun putting an additional license for their contributions within their profile.
http://www.google.com/search?.q=site:meta.stackoverflow.com+...
< I decided to cut my editorializing />
~Jed
--
(¹) In order to comply with StackOverflow's attribution requirements, I am required to indicate that:
1. This information was pointed out on StackOverflow
2. Specifically, in the following answer: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/3646/im-worried-abou...
3. By StackOverflow user "Mark Harrison",
4. Whose profile is available at: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/users/116/mark-harrison
I may actually be in violation of the attribution requirements due to an inability to direcly link the StackOverflow user's name to the associated profile.
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/attribution-required/