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I see a lot of turbulence on Stack Overflow these days. (Moderators quitting, SE firing long time employees, etc). And the fact that the Stack Exchange "people" do not try to give any real explanation of what is happening or reasons behind it makes me nervous. I worry that so many people will leave that I will no longer be able to get quality answers from Stack Overflow.

I know that the website engine is owned by Stack Exchange, but who owns the content? Basically I am wondering if all this great content is held hostage by Stack Exchange.

Or, could a new company come and "rescue" us by ingesting all the Stack Overflow content into its own engine and picking up where Stack Exchange is leaving off?

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    Older content is licensed CC-by-SA 3.0. Newer content is licensed CC-by-SA 4.0. StackExchange also has claimed the right to re-license old content to CC-by-SA 4.0.
    – Christian Gibbons
    Commented Jan 17, 2020 at 22:06

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Theoretically, someone could take the content from the data dump, ingest the content, and build their own site replicating everything on all of the Stack Exchange sites included in the dump, as of the last dump.

Great! Let's go do that!

Well, hold on a sec. As others have noted, the content is licensed under CC-by-SA 4.0 (and/or 3.0) with attribution required.

For those to lazy busy to read the blog post, here's an excerpt:

So let me clarify what we mean by attribution. If you republish this content, we require that you:

  1. Visually indicate that the content is from Stack Overflow or the Stack Exchange network in some way. It doesn’t have to be obnoxious; a discreet text blurb is fine.
  2. Hyperlink directly to the original question on the source site (e.g., http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12345)
  3. Show the author names for every question and answer
  4. Hyperlink each author name directly back to their user profile page on the source site (e.g., http://stackoverflow.com/users/12345/username)

Those links have to be standard hrefs, no link shorteners, and no nofollow attributes.

So, yes, someone could create their own site, but it would have to pretty obviously and obnoxiously show that 99% of its content is from SE.

Maybe it's worth it at this point? I leave that up to the reader.

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  • The CC-by-SA 4 license says pretty much the same thing, except for the hyperlink to each author name directly (which could be kind of a pain with community wikis or heavily edited posts).
    – Heretic Monkey
    Commented Jan 17, 2020 at 22:37
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    Fortunately there's already a template for doing this as codidact.com has migrated the writing exchange complete with attribution links.
    – Christian Gibbons
    Commented Jan 17, 2020 at 22:41
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    Note that only point 3 and 4 are required. The first two are just stuff Jeff made up and are not needed to comply with the CC BY SA 4 license. You can even discuss if linking is required, if the user name is not ambiguous it probably isn't, you just need to clearly attribute the work to the author
    – Erik A
    Commented Jan 18, 2020 at 6:33
  • Well, @Erik, I am not a lawyer, but I read the license, and 3.A.1.a.v., “a URI or hyperlink to the Licensed Material to the extent reasonably practicable;” seems to indicate that at least the hyperlink part of 2 is required. Unless the post, having been reproduced without modification on this new site, is “the Licensed Material”... In any case, I agree about point 1.
    – Heretic Monkey
    Commented Jan 19, 2020 at 3:29
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Ostensibly all content on SE is licensed as CC BY-SA 4.0.

However this has not always been the case. Previously content was licenses under the 3.0 licenses. Some speculate that SO's decision to unilaterally re-license 3.0 content as 4.0 is not within their rights, however this has not been challenged in court.

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    More info on the 3.0 vs. 4.0 controversy: this post and this related post.
    – SecretAgentMan
    Commented Jan 17, 2020 at 22:21
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    This is so sad. Challenging in court... So far from the primary goal of expert people who give their free time to answer questions to help others...
    – TGrif
    Commented Jan 19, 2020 at 19:53
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  • Users own their own content
  • Stack Overflow has licensed such content in order to publicly display it

Each user owns their own content and may do whatever they want with it on their own.

However, by posting content to Stack Overflow you grant them an irrevocable license (though this may be legally arguable to be honest, given that it is possible SO violates their end of the user agreement).

In any case, regardless of if SO has a right to license user content, any user may use their own content in whichever way they see fit (aside from removing it providing the license is still in place).

Users may not user other user's content without proper attribution in any medium.

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