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by johndough 60 days ago
> So what about SO code snippets?

StackOverflow snippets are mostly licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 or 4.0, so I'd wager that they are not allowed, either.

The SDL source code makes a few references to stackoverflow.com, but the only place I could find an exact copy was where the author explicitly licensed the code under a more permissive license: https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/blob/5bda0ccfb06ea56c1f15a...
1 comments
Sharlin 60 days ago
Most SO snippets likely aren't unique or creative enough to count as works. If a hundred programmers would write essentially the same snippet to solve a problem, it's not copyrightable.
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johndough 60 days ago
I wouldn't be so sure about that. The famous "rangeCheck" function in the Google vs Oracle lawsuit was only 9 lines: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11722514
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cwillu 60 days ago
And the judge in that case famously stated: “I couldn’t have told you the first thing about Java before this problem. I have done, and still do, a significant amount of programming in other languages. I’ve written blocks of code like rangeCheck a hundred times before. I could do it, you could do it. The idea that someone would copy that when they could do it themselves just as fast, it was an accident. There’s no way you could say that was speeding them along to the marketplace. You’re one of the best lawyers in America, how could you even make that kind of argument?”
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shevy-java 60 days ago
I don't think this can be used as a counter-argument.

Most SO contributions are dead-simple; often just being a link to the documentation or an extended example. I mean just have a look at it.

Finding a comparable SO entry that is similar to Google versus Oracle example, is in my opinion much much harder. I have been using SO in the last 10 years a lot for snippets, and most snippets are low quality. (Some are good though; SO still has use cases, even though it kind of aged out now.)

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embedding-shape 60 days ago
> Most SO snippets likely aren't unique or creative enough to count as works.

How is this different from LLM outputs? Literally trained on the output of N programmers so it can give you a snippet of code based on what it has seen.

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