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Re: [eclipse.org-committers] How to deal with stackoverflow contributions

I've always avoided copying snippets from places where the legal ownership of the code is not clear into open source projects. Regardless of the eventual legal outcomes, tiny snippets of copied code have created massive legal headaches in Oracle vs Google as well as SCO vs IBM. Just don't do it, it's not worth it.

When I do find a snippet in Stack overflow, I read the code, understand what's it's doing and why, and then I close stack overflow and go and write it myself. Sometimes this might require going and re-working out what the right classes, methods etc to use are, but that's important, because in doing that, I read the docs, and I come to understand the code much better. It also helps to catch errors, or catch cases where my use case is slightly different and needs something else. In my opinion, if I can't write a snippet of code from scratch myself, then I shouldn't be using it, since I don't understand it well enough.

On Sat., 9 Jun. 2018, 08:36 Markus KARG, <markus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I doubt you can use the snippet, as a committer has to be either the sole
author or can otherwise guarantee that *all* contributors are fine with
EPL'ing it.
-Markus


-----Original Message-----
From: eclipse.org-committers-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:eclipse.org-committers-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Christian
Pontesegger
Sent: Donnerstag, 7. Juni 2018 19:39
To: eclipse.org-committers@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [eclipse.org-committers] How to deal with stackoverflow
contributions

Hi,

I would like to ask how we should deal @ eclipse with code saples taken from
stackoverflow. Nowaday it is quite common to find code snippets on
stackoverflow and reuse them for own implementations. While this might be
common practice, I would like to know how such contributions should be dealt
with.

Stackoverflow has a license
https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/06/25/attribution-required/

that at least requires attribution. Say we would re-use a code snippet like
this one:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30031748/how-to-get-image-from-plugin-in
ternal-resources?utm_medium=organic&utm_source=google_rich_qa&utm_campaign=g

oogle_rich_qa

What would be the correct way to use it within a commit? Attribution in the
source code next to the snippet? Would we need to file a CQ?


thanks for your answers
Christian

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