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)<p><a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/" rel="nofollow">http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/</a>
<a href="http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions#Can_I_use_a_Creative_Commons_license_for_software.3F" rel="nofollow">http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions#C...</a><p>[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.<p>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.<p><a href="http://www.google.com/search?.q=site:meta.stackoverflow.com+stack+overflow+code+snippet+license+legality" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/search?.q=site:meta.stackoverflow.com+...</a><p>&#60; I decided to cut my editorializing /&#62;<p>~Jed<p>--<p>(¹) In order to comply with StackOverflow's attribution requirements, I am required to indicate that:<p>1. This information was pointed out on StackOverflow<p>2. Specifically, in the following answer:
<a href="http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/3646/im-worried-about-stack-overflow-content-licensing/3791#3791" rel="nofollow">http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/3646/im-worried-abou...</a><p>3. By StackOverflow user "Mark Harrison",<p>4. Whose profile is available at:
<a href="http://meta.stackoverflow.com/users/116/mark-harrison" rel="nofollow">http://meta.stackoverflow.com/users/116/mark-harrison</a><p>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.<p><a href="http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/attribution-required/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/attribution-required/</a>