I understand that this may be a boring topic to many, but given the problems a site like StackOverflow had in the past[1], it may be worth considering this question.
What is the license for code posted on Clojureverse?
By default the poster will have the copyright to their contribution (at least if it is significant). No one else may use it at all.
StackOverflow chose the creative commons license CC-BY-SA which is a copyleft license. That means that no one can use code from SO for a closed-source product. (Yes, not many people are aware of that).
Do people share significant amount of code on Clojureverse at all? What does the community think should be allowed with that code?
In my opinion and in keeping with the generally rather “strict” approach to licensing in the Clojure (and Java) ecosystem, we should follow StackOverflow’s lead here.
I think it’s pretty rare that anyone deploys copy & pasted code literally to production, most code examples I come across are either specifically tailored to code from the respective question, or general/pseudocode that’s of no use being just copy & pasted.
We could introduce a community guideline encouraging users to provide “anonymised” code instead of real project code, for questions and for answers, to at least make it clear that code here is not to be used “literally” in products.
I think a permissive license makes sense here, most code that’s shared here are small snippets that you’d expect to be able to reuse wherever.
We do have to watch out how to phrase this because people might also post pieces of code belonging to existing open source projects. In that case the code already has a license, and that license should remain unchanged.
