Caution! Code from Stackoverflow
Software professionals these days are used to asking questions, sharing answers, posting code and coping code from sites like stackoverflow.com, stackexchange.com
As a community this is very good and helps everybody, however there are intellectual property and copyright issues, in using these sites, that we all must be aware of.
Lets take the example of stackoverflow.com, at the bottom of the web page you will find the following text.
"user contributions licensed under cc by-sa 3.0 with attribution required"
TWO things you must know about cc-by-sa 3.0?
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Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
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ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.
Reference: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Did you realise, this is a viral license like GPL.
Now that you known this, you must never copy code directly from stackoverflow or sister sites. Understand the solution and implement it your way, this might still not mean your code is clean, but it is much safer than copying directly, i am not a legal expert so please consult your legal department.
If you have copied code directly into commercial software consult your legal department now.
CC-BY-SA license is not meant for code, it is meant for content, however this license gets applied to any code segment shared on stackoverflow.com and sister sites. How CC-BY-SA applies to code is a legally open question and there is no court case precedence yet as far as I am aware of, also different countries might threat this differently.
Please don't stop sharing that is not my intention in bring up the topic, however we all need to be aware of the risks.
I seriously hope these sites add a separate less restrictive non-viral license for code that is shared, until than be careful!
NOTICE: I am not a legal expert, so don't consider any of these as legal advice, please consult your legal depart before making any decisions, these are my interpretations and suggestions as a fellow software professional.
I completely agree with you Bhavesh Bhojani. veterans understand this. The responsibility now lies with us to groom the fresh blood! Sometimes I wonder if ppl can code w/o "Googling"
True. I think it is time companies conduct rudimentary trainings wherein developers (and employees in general) get to know the overalls of most (open) licenses and the sensitivity that they must impart while using stuff from the Net. A somewhat safe assumption to make would probably be "When in doubt, credit".
Nice post Bhavesh. Licensing itself is a completely unknown arena to most of the s/w developers. There are some tools to verify your code's authenticity eg: Black duck Protex. But hardly people follows.
Great observation, Bhavesh! One more point we have to worry is that if the code shared by the original author has the right to share. E.g., if the developer is part of a company, most likely s/he does not own the copyright of the code shared