@Zizouz212 I'm pretty sure i'm correct about xkcd comics not being acceptable in a stack exchange post

Stack Exchange is a commercial operation. The license specifically says "no commercial use".

Also the XKCD comic is not "share alike", and all stack exchange comments are "share alike"

You are not allowed to take CC BY-NC content and include is part of something you license under CC BY-SA.

@AbhiBeckert You're perfectly allowed to link to them: However, you're right, it doesn't really look like you can embed them.

I'll see if I can find something on that.

@Zizouz212 he only linked to it originally, then somebody edited his link to embed the image, and then he reverted it back to only being a link (with a comment on my post on the meta site saying that he was "following xkcd's instructions" that you are only allowed to link to their comics

Well, I've locked the post, so there can't be any changes to it. I'll see if I can find a resource somewhere on meta if we can do it or not

On a side note... the edit history's default view doesn't handle images very well, I had to switch to "side by side" view to see which edit added the image. We should keep that in mind in future.

Yep, I think I actually approved the edit :/

I remember it clearly, it looked like a link fixup

The XKCD's site has this "If you're not sure whether your use is noncommercial, feel free to email me and ask (if you're not sure, it's probably okay)."

There are lots of instances where XKCD has been embedded, but I'll see if I can find a resource, and then report back

the part I'm uncomfortable with is that other people might (do?) scrape stack exchange assuming that everything is ok for commercial use

I don't think we should really worry about that: let SE take care of it

I'm sure XKCD is fine with comics being embedded here, but what else will it be used for?

yeah

And I don't think it should be our responsibility if others don't follow the rules

nope, not our responsibility. I'm happy with how it's been resolved

Not sure if you've seen the comment I made a few minutes ago on the name change meta post... I'm thinking of proposing "Pull Request" as a name... do you think it might go anywhere?

Probably not

On this site, nothing goes anywhere :/

there are plenty of insances of xkcd being included in answers

@ratchetfreak Always at the weirdest, most unexpected times

how?

Well I'll stick it in there anyway, it's far better than "The Lark" or "CONTRIBUTORS"

Yep

Quite personally, I'm going to vouch for the original name we had "Free & Open", but it might be a while before we meet

About embedding, it will likely fall under fair use anyway I think

shrug you're free to vouch for that name, but the more I think about it the more I agree with Tim Post's reasoning for why it's no good

So I know that he originally proposed Libre & Open, but for some reason, no one likes that... :/

there is an "open data" beta site, and the "open science" beta just failed (and started up again as a proposal...). Free & Open makes it seem like our site covers all of the questions those sites cover

also programmers.stackexchange.com/a/65229/25768

The first one (short/complex password) is fair use, so he does not need to comply with the license as he's not violating copyright if he breaches the license

the second one has a comment saying it should just be a link, not an image

@AbhiBeckert So one thing that I've noticed about Open Data, was that it isn't about open, but where to find it really

regardless, there are tons of questions about "free" stuff that we do not allow on our site, and there are tons of questions about "open" stuff that we do not allow

therefore I think Free & Open is not a good name

but we don't have to agree

on progs it's mostly found in old off-topic posts (before the rules changed)

We don't have to agree? That's fine, everyone will find an argument to make sure that it's impossible for anyone to agree :)

if 15 years of open source has taught me anything, it's that you can't get people to agree on things like this, you just have to find a name that doesn't have too many people hating it and go with that name

actually... resolving issues where you can't get consensus would make a good question for the site!

how about "how do you come up with a good name for a community?" or "how do you decide what logo to use for your project?"

It would probably be closed as opinion-based :P

But, I can just reopen it like that :D

I think it's appropriate to delete opinion based answers and allow questions to stay alive as long as it's possible to post a non-opinion based answer

it's ok to post a "this is how we did it, and it worked" answer right? That's not opinion, that's fact

But then people will blame the question, and hence close it. The argument would be the answers are a result of the question

@AbhiBeckert Looks fine to me

@Zizouz212 though light on context

I think people who vote to close incorrectly should be slapped on the wrist. Stack Overflow used to allow opinion based stuff, they only started closing those questions when the site started getting huge amounts of traffic and it was causing problems with relevancy on the site

and then they moved it to their own site and had to shut that down as well

One of the reasons why we have so many licensing questions is because of the opinion based fear: all questions on project management are broad and opinion based, and since the first questions were broad, no one dares to ask

@AbhiBeckert I can't wait to do that :)

I think opinion based questions are good if they get 5 or 6 opinions

they are bad when they get 500 opinions, which is what happened on stack overflow before they started closing them

And the fact is many opinion based questions are very interesting and very constructive

but they can be dangerous when there are flamewars involved

Broad = not okay, opinion-based = fine if it's constructive

And quite personally, I think a lot of opinion-based questions that are closed is because they derive from experience, and there isn't a "source" to back up the claim, as to "discussion" questions

It was a long time ago, but I think I heard someone (might have been Joel Spolsky?) say that they wish opinion based questions could be allowed, but it just doesn't work with huge amounts of traffic

@AbhiBeckert Likely due to the fear of having too many answers (mind you, a lot of answers just end up duplicating each other)

I don't think it was fear of having too many answers though, they allowed those questions until they recognised a pattern of getting too many answers

I would like to do the same here. Try allowing those questions explicitly, and if it doesn't work out... then we can change our mind. We are a beta site right?

Sure, but as long as they are more constructive in nature, then they're fine

but a question where the can be are 2 valid answers that just differ by 1 word "not" is not constructive

@ratchetfreak I disagree, I think that would be constructive. If you have a problem, and two people take completely opposite approaches to solve it (Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds both created extremely successful operating systems...), it is extremely constructive to tell someone that those two solutions can be used to solve their problem

the answers wouldn't be constructive at least

@AbhiBeckert where is the DMCA getting involved in opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1603/… ?

@AbhiBeckert Your metaphor fails to mirror the specific case. There's nothing opposite about the products of Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds.

Also, how answers can be constructive is not the concern here - the question remains unconstructive because it attracts answers that are not specific enough for any reasonable readers.

@Martijn the DMCA would get involved if the software user or software author do not own copyright for the files

@Unihedron that's exactly my point, winodws and linux are roughly the same end result arrived at via completely different techniques

two valid opposite answers to the same question

@AbhiBeckert they would have to be better than "yes, you can" vs. "no, you can't"

DMCA specially allows reverse engineering for interoperability. Besides, a primary intention to circumvent DRM must be shown

True enough, there have been (many) spurious suits, but that pretty much goes for anything

but if the software was intended to decrypt documents (and I'd argue that the question in that case is pretty misleading), then yeah, the WIPO provisions are relevant

@Martijn it depends on how the case goes and how well the "specialists" explain everything to the lay man

I'm personally not aware of any verdict that found someone who didn't have any intention writing decryption software guilty.

@ratchetfreak the whole point is to encourage people to say "how can I achieve X with my project?". A simple "yes/no" answer doesn't help

@Martijn I am not personally aware of any lawsuit ever where the DMCA was used to find somebody guilty. But there have been countless lawsuits that settled out of court for secret amounts of compensation.

Some of those secret settlements are likely to have involved hundreds of millions of dollars being given to the copyright holder

and for every lawsuit that settled... how many were settled before a lawsuit was even filed? Maybe 10x as many?

copyright holder?

you are talking about the WIPO provisions right?

no, just the normal DMCA

well I guess that is related to WIPO

the DMCA It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology [...] intended to circumvent measures [...] that control access to copyrighted works

title 1 DMCA right?

yeah, those are the WIPO provisions

I'm just quoting the wikipedia summary right now, not the actual legislation

the copyright holders don't enter the picture for the WIPO provisions

why not?

I'm not sure where I said they get involved anyway?

"Some of those secret settlements are likely to have involved hundreds of millions of dollars being given to the copyright holder"

ah ok, fair enough

anyway, lets not get into a huge debate... the question was "is patents the only thing I need to worry about" and the answer is "patents and the DMCA are all you need to worry about"

I'll look in to it a little further later

as I'm not aware of any cases where someone settled where they didn't know they were creating decryption software either. But I'm not very sure there aren't any

The DMCA does not cover decryption software

it covers "access control" measures

those access control measures could be as simple as "if data[43331] == 1 { refuseToPlayContent() }"

when you're working with an undocumented format... you wouldn't know that the bit at offset 43331 controls wether or not the content can be played in a certain situation, so you could easily violate it

or it could be even worse, the restriction might not even be in the file at all

I pay $2 a week to watch some sport on my laptop, if I plug an external monitor in then the software will not play the video. That restriction is in the software, not in the data... but because the data is in a proprietary format, the fact that it can't be played without their software makes it an "access control"

I can easily see somebody deciding to reverse engineer a file format because the officially sanctioned software doesn't have a feature that might not exist because the copyright holder will not allow the feature to exist

@AbhiBeckert roughly the same end result == !(opposite)

@Unihedron you need to read what I wrote more carefully. I said they achieved the same result via opposite approaches. A closed source expensive operating system is completely different to an open source free (as in beer) one, but they both are valid and proven techniques to make a massively successful OS

Ok. So, I'm gonna preface this with "Honest to god guys, I don't want to argue. I just really truthfully want to know"

Is anybody here a fan of the GPL? Because that license is just more trouble than it's worth in my experience.

I mean, as a developer, trying to use and comply with it is an awful and confusing experience. I'd be interested in hearing something good about it.

I get why it exists

but that it limits the use of libraries is a pain

LGPL is much better in that regard