https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing > Content contributed before 2011-04-08 (UTC) is distributed under the terms

https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing > Content contributed before 2011-04-08 (UTC) is distributed under the terms of CC BY-SA 2.5. > Content contributed from 2011-04-08 up to but not including 2018-05-02 (UTC) is distributed under the terms of CC BY-SA 3.0. > Content contributed on or after 2018-05-02 (UTC) is distributed under the terms of CC BY-SA 4.0. Basically it says you may share the code and you may use it for any purpose, but you must give attribution and you must license your derived work under the same license. If you don't do those things then you are basically relying on some kind of fair use or "this is too trivial to be copyrightable". But yeah, there really is a license.