@Tinkeringbell re: "is there that little trust left?", SE Inc's lawyers are duty bound to protect their client's interest, not the community. It's never a good idea to trust someone else's lawyers to protect your interest. Saying "our lawyers signed off on this" is not a response to the concern.
@Tinkeringbell Wait a second... Didn't notice that before... is that a typo? You really mean that a reply to the license issue was posted on another question about the Code of Conduct???
@terdon the strongest statement was "our counsel is and will continue to be involved and on-board with any steps we take to perform our role as stewards of our sites". The direct question "did your lawyers confirm this was legal before you did it" as never been answered.
Worse than "if SE can get away with this illegal relicense they can get away with any future illegal relicense" is it sets a precedent allowing any company to get away with illegally relicensing content.
@Hitodama indeed the licence would be invalid. If SE doesn't have the right to grant CC-BY-SA 4.0 to themselves, they certainly don't have the right to grant it to anyone else.
It would be SE that's liable though, not the person who was mislead into thinking a CC-BY-SA 4.0 license was available.
I think that another user could legally use content pre-ToS change under 3.0. Whether and how the original 3.0 license was invalidated by SE's actions is complicated.
Though to be airtight, you couldn't include any content that was added when the ToS said 2.5.
@StopHarmingMonica yep, but that would mean that they would fall in the problem that John pointed out. So, yep, others couldn't use the 4.0 license - but so wouldn't SE. What I meant is that the original claim I linked implied that the switch was made so that SE could use the content while OTHERS could not - that is invalid -> if the license upgrade is really not legal then they too have lost the license on the content.
The United States federal Superfund law is officially known as the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 (CERCLA). The federal Superfund program, administered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is designed to investigate and clean up sites contaminated with hazardous substances. Sites managed under this program are referred to as "Superfund" sites. There are 40,000 federal Superfund sites across the country, and approximately 1,600 of those sites have been listed on the National Priorities List (NPL). Sites on the NPL are considered the most...
@Tinkeringbell They already have the left top menu (where they usually put that stuff) and I have no interest in their podcasts (which have nothing to do with anything going on and mostly just make me more angry that their answer seems to be ignore until everyone goes away) so...yeah, no banners
> Once upon a time, I, Chuang Chou, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, a veritable butterfly, enjoying itself to the full of its bent, and not knowing it was Chuang Chou. Suddenly I awoke, and came to myself, the veritable Chuang Chou. Now I do not know whether it was then I dreamt I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.
I also don't use StackOverflow for Q&A on those because its not the best resource anymore (lot of old posts not being updated....like really old powershell esp)
@ShadowThePrincessWizard That might actually be a good thing. At least, if SE is bought by Microsoft, I'll no longer be afraid the network's being run by Evil Corp®, I'll know it.
@ShadowThePrincessWizard Sorry, I still don't get it. I mean, I'm happy for SE that they're getting more money from Microsoft, but banners should be about stuff that affects my usage of the site.
@Stevoisiak But not sufficiently far from Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish for my liking... OTOH, I'm old enough to remember when Microsoft were just a bunch of geeks who were beginning to have a little bit of success, and they had the good will of the hacker community.
@PM2Ring I can't find the article, but an MS developer once wrote about the first time they went to a Linux conference. Developers visibly stopped talking when they sat at a table.
@Rubiksmoose You should try it some time! Charges in a couple moments, makes it easy to just pop away whenever you're almost about to be killed by daleks...