Can we put "Software Licensing Questions are off-topic" in the FAQ?

Question

These questions have a number of problems.

1. They are questions about legal issues, and none of us are lawyers.
2. They are proxy support questions for the FSF and other such organizations, who should be spending their own hard-earned dollars fielding questions about their opaque agreements.
3. We are taking money out of the pockets of starving ambulance chas.. er, lawyers.

I claim that:

1. Without legal expertise, any answers are going to be merely opinions, unless the answerer is reading the text of the license and interpreting it in "plain language," something the OP ought to be able to do himself. We're running an SE site, not Yahoo Answers.

2. The experts capable of answering these questions properly (licensing lawyers and organizations such as the Free Software Foundation) are not particularly interested in Programmers.SE. We're not "attracting the experts" with these questions.

Answer 1

Your arguments 2. and 3. hardly make sense.

Can we put ".net/Java questions off topic" in the FAQ?

1. (deliberately left blank)

2. They are proxy support questions for Microsoft/Oracle who should be spending their own hard-earned dollars fielding questions about their tools.

3. We are taking money out of the pockets of starving .net/Java trainers, book authors, ExpertSexchange etc.

So we are left with 1. No, we are not lawyers, but for many questions, answers already exist, e.g. on FSF's own website, and pointing to those answers (probably written or reviewed by a lawyer) is good enough for many purposes. Considering the many misconceptions existing about e.g. the implications of using a GPL-based product, I think it would be sad not to allow such questions here.

Answer 2

The only point that seems to be one to consider is the first one, since the other points can be applied to nearly any question asked on any Stack Exchange site.

Even though none of us are lawyers, we still deal with software licenses on a regular basis. As an engineer, I'm expected to know if I am able to use an open source tool or project based on its license. For any software developer who contributes to or publishes open source projects, an understanding of the license is also important to know how the code can be reused or redistributed.

If a particular question relies on local or national laws or requires the specific knowledge of a lawyer, I wouldn't have a problem closing it. However, there are many questions that I would expect a software development professional to be able to answer or provide experiences about.

Answer 3

The questions are on-topic, and appropriate for understanding by any practicing professional programmer.

Thanks to Richard Stallman and the GNU Manifesto, all programmers have to have a the same level of understanding legal issues of code use that any businessperson needs to have of contracts. If there were a Small Business Stack Exchange, I suspect simple contract questions, purchase order mechanics discussions, and requests for advice about factoring accounts receivable would be on-topic. I also expect many answers would start, "IANAL, but ...". There are certainly topics of discussion at small-business groups all around the USA, even when there are no lawyers in the room.

For programmers, it was not always so - the 1970s and early 1980s were a wonderful time of free sharing of code among practicing programmers, often with the code being explicitly in the public domain. But it is now, as the GPL and every other license it inspired have forced these kinds of decisions upon us. And so we need to have places to discuss them, and the Programmers Stack Exchange is an appropriate venue.

Answer 4

The prohibition of giving legal advice relates to US laws regarding practicing law without a license and it seems to have morphed into a social convention for idle chit chat even when people are obviously not pretending to be lawyers or trying to evade professional licensing laws. This is an international website and it would be unfair to people who live in jurisdictions that don't give a flying f about who is professional enough to give advice about software licensing.

Answer 5

There is a difference between legal advice and an answer. I have answered many questions based on reading the licenses as well as lot of other literature that discusses them.

If you ask me "Whether can i use Apache licensed code in my commercial project" the correct answer is Yes. This is neither a mere opinion nor does it need that i must be a lawyer.

The point is that understanding of the subject is usually good and often more important than all fine print. Usually lawyer never make you understand! You seek answer for the purpose of understanding but seek lawyer's help to prepare the notice to be submitted to court. And which is why even if i have lawyer at my disposal i would like to ask this question to P.SE about people's view on it.

I believe since we work in software development day in day out; issue about piracy, jail breaking, copy right and licensing, all affect our lives and we must be prepared to learn these subjects pretty much the same way we must learn software methodologies even apart of our programming skills.

It is to enable such learning that we must allow P.SE to permit such questions.

Answer 6

Most of the licensing questions I see take one of two forms.

1. Does [license] allow me to [do something]?
2. I want my software to have [certain restrictions]. What should my license be?

The problem is that while programmers can answer questions about software licenses that are common knowledge, we cannot provide expertise about the finer points or gray areas of software licenses.