Stack Overflow: Your Favorite Code Snippet Library or a Ticking Legal Time Bomb?
We’ve all been there. It’s 2 AM, your deadline is in 6 hours, and you need to parse a JSON response in a way that’s just slightly off from what Google tells you is standard. You open Stack Overflow in a new tab, find exactly what you need, copy-paste it into your codebase, and move on with your life. Fifteen developers in your company do the same thing every week. Then, five years later, during due diligence for a funding round—or worse, a lawsuit threat—someone discovers that the code snippet you borrowed from Stack Overflow is actually derivative work from a GPL-licensed project....