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Stack Overflow is in the midst of a great question closing for the various licensing tags. Given that those are on topic here, we should figure out a way to get a hold of that traffic.

I've asked for a pointer to here to be put into the tag wikis on the SO side, but I'm not sure if that is going to happen.

So, any other ideas would be great.

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    First wait for public beta.
    – cpast
    Jun 3, 2015 at 17:38
  • 2
    Some of them will be on-topic here. Others will be on-topic on Open Source SE, assuming it reaches public beta.
    – Mark
    Jun 3, 2015 at 22:55
  • 1
    I think they're mostly currently on-topic on Programmers.
    – cpast
    Jun 4, 2015 at 1:39
  • @Cpast you are right, I don't visit that site enough. I was never a big fan of the split between SO and Programmers though. . .
    – dsolimano
    Jun 4, 2015 at 13:47

2 Answers 2

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It looks like these are already on topic on Programmers as @cpast pointed out, though also on topic here. So we probably don't need to do anything drastic.

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Programmers regular, non-lawyer here, and the author of the Programmers Stack Exchange Licensing FAQ.

The tl;dr of that FAQ is basically "Programmers are not lawyers, and therefore only questions that are common knowledge about how the licenses work are on topic on Programmers."

As I am not a regular on this Stack, it's not for me to say whether you want the much more detailed software licensing questions that we get all the time, though I would like to know the answer to that question, whatever you decide. However, you should know that there are a huge number of licensing questions that we get all the time that are not on topic there; we could begin to refer them to you if you would like.

Here are some examples of "good" questions that we don't consider ourselves qualified to answer:

Additionally, as @Snowman has reminded me, questions about software copyright are never on topic on Programmers.StackExchange.

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  • Also note that questions on Programmers.SE must be able licensing, not copyright, and in the context of the asker's own software project.
    – user385
    Jun 19, 2015 at 13:50
  • I believe that, at this time, we are leaning towards only giving general advice on what people could do in certain situations. Nothing here should be construed as legal advice, and so if that is what your users are looking for, it's probably not appropriate. My intuition, based on what I've seen, is that the first of your examples is more likely to be answered here than the latter two - the lack of detail makes it less likely that an answer could be construed as legal advice, and hence reduces the likelihood of malpractice claims. That's just my feeling about it, anyway.
    – jimsug
    Jun 19, 2015 at 14:56
  • @jimsug If "nothing here should be construed as legal advice" then most / all of the questions I'm referring to should not be migrated here, either.
    – durron597
    Jun 19, 2015 at 15:00
  • @durron597: The primary reason for not giving legal advice I think is that most are looking to avoid UPL or malpractice claims. As mentioned, I think the first one would be acceptable on the basis that we've answered sparsely-detailed questions before: here, for instance we have answered something that could very easily be used in a practical context. It really depends on what the OP is looking for - if it's a general answer to a legal question, we can probably help. If it's legal advice on their situation, probably not so much.
    – jimsug
    Jun 19, 2015 at 15:02

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