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> And what's to say Stack Overflow won't become like EE some day, and start holding answers hostage? Joel and Jeff have explicitly tackled that issue in the po
by alexfarran 17y ago
> And what's to say Stack Overflow won't become like EE some day, and start holding answers hostage?
Joel and Jeff have explicitly tackled that issue in the podcast, with reference to IMDB and CDDB as well as "the hyphen site". All the user generated content on Stack Overflow is licensed under cc-wiki and available as an anonymised data dump. http://bit.ly/cGWxT5 http://bit.ly/cGWxT5
- dustingetz 17y agoright, but if/when they take VC funding they start down a path leading to loss of control, and a future CEO may lock future contributions.
- bad_user 17y agoThen you can create a more open alternative and import their data legally.
- Kadin 17y agoIf that were to happen, someone could fork the site using the last CC-licensed data dump. I would hope that would happen immediately upon any change in licensing away from CC/GPL/GFDL/similar. It's not impossible but they can't just make off with the data in the way that CDDB did. (Now, if you want to talk about a company abusing the community ... look at Yelp.)