This question was deleted:

Can I dynamically call a LGPL/GPL software in my closed-source application?

I agree that it is off topic for SO, there is no denying that. However, it is linked to in the Programmers.SE Legal Question FAQ. Can we rescue the question in some way please?

There are a couple of options here:

  1. Replace the link with either a screenshot or an archive.org link (if one exists, haven't checked)
  2. Undelete and lock the question (probably with removing the tag, as it's been burninated..
    • +44 and 20000 views might not meet the threshold normally, but it's a pretty darn useful question and answer.
    • My preferred option. I probably wouldn't bother if it weren't linked in a question.
  3. Undelete and migrate the question to Programmers (not preferred as it's so old)
  4. Other (something I haven't thought of)

Moderator Note

The question linked is currently locked for a period of 7 days while discussion takes place and (hopefully) an overall community consensus is reached.

  • 27
    Copy the content (with attribution) to Programmers? – Jeffrey Bosboom Jun 29 '16 at 0:47
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    Migrate the entire question to Programmers? (it's probably too old to do normally, but if it's important enough it might be possible for the SE team to do...) – Robotnik Jun 29 '16 at 6:57
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    AFAICT the error was in linking to a SO question in the first place. I really don't see why something like a FAQ in SE site X should use as an example a question asked on a site Y... – Bakuriu Jun 29 '16 at 7:30
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    @Bakuriu Hysterical raisins? – SQB Jun 29 '16 at 9:10
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    Don't we have opensource.stackexchange.com for questions like that? – CodeCaster Jun 29 '16 at 9:30
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    Whenever I see a very useful question like this I tend to favorite them and I browse through the favorited questions from time to time to see if something has happened on them. Otherwise, we keep deleting good stuff in a very silly way. See another example. – fedorqui 'SO stop harming' Jun 29 '16 at 9:39
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    I know we've talked about this before ad nauseum, but can someone provide a good argument why this needs to be deleted? Sure, it's off-topic, so close it. Is it hurting anything by remaining undeleted? All that means is under 10ks can see it and 10ks have a prayer of actually finding it. If the information is useful to a couple of people, it is making the Internet a worse place to delete it. Undeleting it is a way better solution than pawning it off on Programmers in any form. And there's certainly no reason for the complexity of an "archive". Stack Overflow can archive itself. – Cody Gray Jun 29 '16 at 10:55
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    Move it a blog post, then it's on the internet, programmers.se can link to it, and everyone's happy. – Heretic Monkey Jun 29 '16 at 14:30
  • @CodeCaster Yes indeed. We're more than happy to host those kinds of questions. Migration isn't really desirable, but for someone to repost on Open Source would be good :) – Zizouz212 Jun 30 '16 at 18:13
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    I'm curious on why we don't have some outline for handling cases in general such as these. Therefore, I've created a meta post on the topic: Procedure on handling formerly on-topic questions – Zizouz212 Jun 30 '16 at 18:38
  • @Zizouz212 +1 I was thinking of the same thing. I'm sure there are many more closed licensing questions here which we're unintentionally rehashing at OS.SE, which we could all benefit from! – Tim Malone Jun 30 '16 at 19:48
  • This has now been reposted at OpenSource.SE - see my answer below. @JonClements Please leave the SO question in its current state for a bit longer in case anyone wants to bring across the other answers. – Tim Malone Jun 30 '16 at 19:52

UPDATE: The Open Source.SE community has agreed to take this question. It has now been reposted with the question and accepted answer.

Anyone can feel free to copy over the remaining answers if they think they are useful (I haven't read the other answers yet but will check through them later on if no-one else has).

Since it's old, a migration isn't possible. But as a regular at Open Source.SE, it's completely on-topic there.

If we can find a duplicate, I'm sure we'd be happy to fold the information in, and if we can't, I'm sure we'd be happy to re-create it.

I've created a Meta Open Source post to ask about it.

  • 8
    Well, it can be migrated by an SE employee, the question is whether the question is sufficiently important to get such a scarce resource involved. I'd say no. If there were a highly-upvoted, accepted, and verified answer by a well-known open-source lawyer, then it might be worth to preserve that history, but as that's not the case, I don't think it's worth it to involve SE staff. – Jörg W Mittag Jun 29 '16 at 19:37
  • @JörgWMittag migrating to sites still in beta, specially if they has a seizable amount of votes is kind of taboo for SE. – Braiam Jun 29 '16 at 21:36
  • @Braiam: I know. That's also one of the reasons why the software-licensing tag still exists at P.SE. But, IMO, and I know this goes against official policy, with the new graduation criteria, it is almost impossible for an even moderately healthy site to fail, and both OS.SE and Law.SE are actually very well off, with a healthy amount of activity and extremely high-quality content. So, the argument "the site is still in beta, it might get closed and vanish from the face of teh Interwebs", while technically true, doesn't hold water, IMO. – Jörg W Mittag Jun 29 '16 at 21:53
  • @JörgWMittag Open Source has received migrations before, and as far as I'm aware so have other beta sites, so it does happen. – Tim Malone Jun 29 '16 at 21:57
  • @JörgWMittag I'd be in favour of preserving it. Scope changes. We get that. However, if people get hurt as a result of those changes, we should always try to minimize it. Yes, it's probably not worth getting an SE employee to migrate it, but it would definitely be helpful to the entire online community to preserve it in some form, even if it's just a repost on Open Source SE - which is completely acceptable (I'm a mod there!) – Zizouz212 Jun 30 '16 at 18:09
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    I still sort of think the old question should be migrated for attribution reasons. I don't agree with the "too old to migrate" logic for OFF TOPIC questions. – durron597 Jun 30 '16 at 21:48
  • @durron597 I agree with you, but I don't think that's something that will change quickly - it probably needs an Uber Meta post and 6-8 weeks. For attribution, I added the original links including links to author's profiles in the new posts. – Tim Malone Jun 30 '16 at 21:50
  • @TimMalone at the very least you should community wiki the Q and A, IMO. – durron597 Jun 30 '16 at 21:51
  • @durron597 I did.. and then it got removed by a mod. I've asked them why. I'll CW the answer again now actually, but I need a mod to do it to the question again. – Tim Malone Jun 30 '16 at 21:52
  • @TimMalone actually, you don't have to do that, unless you are expecting lots of edits. blog.stackoverflow.com/2014/04/… – Braiam Jul 1 '16 at 1:05
  • @Braiam But in the absense of being able to set the original authors, it's the next best thing. It certainly wasn't written by me, all I did was copy/paste. – Tim Malone Jul 1 '16 at 1:07
  • @TimMalone not necessarily, I'm able to vouch for the validity of this answer even if I wasn't the original author. Of course, I could have worded it with my own words, but as it was being deleted I decided not to try and be smart and just copy it. – Braiam Jul 1 '16 at 1:11
  • @Braiam It's not about the validity; it's about gaining rep from an answer not written by me. That doesn't feel right. – Tim Malone Jul 1 '16 at 1:12
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    @Braiam ... I never suggested others do the same. Btw, that blog post is talking about removal of the automation of the CW process. That's not what this is. The blog post even specifically says 'you can choose to use [CW]', and it gives three examples where this could apply. At least two of those examples apply to this case. – Tim Malone Jul 1 '16 at 1:37
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    I've updated the link on the Programmers FAQ to point to the Open Source version. – durron597 Jul 1 '16 at 19:24

As a Programmers.SE regular, I'm against migrating it to P.SE. As a SO regular, I agree it is off-topic. Just let it die.

We are currently in the process of re-defining our scope over at P.SE, and it isn't even guaranteed that software-licensing will still be on-topic. We were always a bit uneasy about those questions anyway, and only took them because they had nowhere else to go. Well, now there's Open Source.SE and Law.SE, both of which are much better equipped to answer those kinds of questions.

So, IMO, there's no need to keep the question alive just to avoid a dead link in a FAQ that probably gets re-written anyway.

  • 10
    what about migrating to opensource.SE? – eis Jun 29 '16 at 13:40
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    I am not familiar enough with that specific community to say anything about whether or not that question is on-topic there and meets their quality standards. However, if it is on-topic, I'm willing to bet it's a duplicate. – Jörg W Mittag Jun 29 '16 at 15:11
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    Programmers.SE is in the process of re-defining its scope… again? – Holger Jun 29 '16 at 16:31
  • 5
    @Holger today a day ending in Y, it's about that time again – durron597 Jun 29 '16 at 16:51
  • 1
    @Holger yep, here is the link: New Site Name and Scope Proposals – user439793 Jun 29 '16 at 16:57
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    @Holger: Actually, I feel it's the first time it ever had a scope. It was originally created as an outlet for everything that is "not programming related" (which was at that time literally a close-vote reason on SO). That was a disaster. At that time, it had more of an "anti-scope": basically, everything that's off-topic on SO belongs on Programmers. After that, it was more like "everything that's too subjective for SO". That was also a disaster. Crap stays crap, even if you create an extra site for it. (Whaaaaaa?) Then the scope was defined as "conceptual questions about software engineering – Jörg W Mittag Jun 29 '16 at 19:27
  • … and software development". It's a good scope, but the site name is actively misleading, so the regulars and mods petitioned SE to change the name. That was denied. Almost five years later, a couple of months ago, that petition was re-newed, this time with painfully won hard evidence that the misleading name is actively hurting the site (there are plenty of comments from authors of off-topic questions that say that they were mislead by the name into thinking that their question about book reading habits was on-topic, because they were a programmer, for example). And this time SE said yes, but – Jörg W Mittag Jun 29 '16 at 19:30
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    … under the condition that we need to define our scope razor-sharp and in such a way that there will never a name change ever again. The current front-runner is "Software Engineering", which I find a bit too narrow, but past experience tells us it's easier to be too narrow officially and lenient in practice than trying to be inclusive and fight a never-ending river of crap. – Jörg W Mittag Jun 29 '16 at 19:33
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    @eis: See meta.stackoverflow.com/a/327132/2988 . A regular on OS.SE confirms it is on-topic and they want it over there. – Jörg W Mittag Jun 29 '16 at 19:38
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    @eis Yippie! Open Source! Yippie! Bring it there! – Zizouz212 Jun 30 '16 at 18:10

That reason can be used against the roomba. Someone linked it somewhere and the link went under. You know why nobody rejects roomba? Because if there is a real need for people to ask this question, they will ask them. This link went unnoticed for 6 months, do you really believe that in that time (and given the knack of users to ask questions then search, sorry, they don't search at all) nobody asked the same thing anywhere else? Look for it. If it was asked, there's no real reason for us to undelete it, if not that's just more reason to keep it deleted, since nobody is missing this information.

As I said before:

A deleted question whose useful content is available elsewhere is good deletion. Remember, not every question under the sun should be asked here, if that means that we need to expend more effort in making the content available in a more substantial form (i.e., too broad questions broken down, opinion-based becomes fact check, off-topic becomes blog post or examples on documentation, etc.) which are more searchable and precise.

And even before that:


  1. Fix the question. That is always, always the first action.

Can't fix the question?

  1. Try to re-ask the question in a way that fits Stack Overflow guidelines and import over the content. That sometimes means separating a long answer into more small answer and question pair.

Still doesn't fit SO Q&A style?

  1. Look around, where does it fit? Tag wiki? A discussion forum? A blog? Remember, that what you want to salvage is the content. So long the content is alive, somewhere, and can be findable, you are doing it right. And yes, that means "even if the content won't stay on Stack Overflow".

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