Joe Blog's A Day In The Life Of Your Average Joe

Posting Code How-To’s Online

This is something I've given quite some thought to in the recent weeks. I recently moved for a job in software development, and as I'm sure many of you can imagine, sometimes you get stuck coding and turn to your favourite search engine for advice. More often than not you'll get taken to StackOverflow, a blog post, forums/message boards and finally, official documentation.

All of this got me wondering...when you post code help via StackOverflow, or how-to's on a blog, is it done with the intention of actually distributing that code to others for use how they see fit, be it in a commercial application or a personal project the reader might be working on. I think it's a very grey area when you delve into it, after all, I wouldn't mind other people using my code in any shape or form, in fact I'd find it quite the compliment! Sure it'd be quite nice if they sent an email or left a comment to say "hey, this was just what I was looking for and I've used it for XYZ" - it's nice to know that you've been able to help someone solve something.

On the other hand, if I was being picky about this, especially as my line of work currently sees me developing in C# (and not via Mono either), I could throw licensing into the mix and say that people are free to use my code as long as they have my permission and reference that they've used it somewhere. This in turn would present a company with issues as to whether they could actually use it or not, because that kind of license would almost certainly be some sort of Open-Source license, meaning that they almost certainly wouldn't use it, because it would then mean they'd have to contend with satisfying the requirements of an Open-Source license.

I think there's several issues here that I haven't even touched upon, but it made me stop and think about it, so maybe it will provide you with some food for thought too.