I've gotta say That I was reasonably excited to see this proposal go into beta, but to date, it's been mostly nothing more than licensing questions. I was hoping for... something more.
Always a good way to form a community is leading by example. So if you want the community include more non-licensing question you should ask some good questions yourself.
Another way might be encouraging questions about specific topics. I've seen on Worldbuilding that there was a week about asking map-related questions (and it seems that's an regular event). Maybe something similar could be created here, although I think the community should grow a little bit more first.
In my opinion, there should be a lot more discouragement of questions that can be answered by reading the frequently asked licensing questions of the main FLOSS organizations.
At the very least, there should be more "What have you tried to answer that question yourself?", or "Why does $faqentry not answer your question?" comments.
This may prevent non-licensing questions from being drowned in licensing questions, because either the additional research effort required help to answer the questions, or at least dissuades people from asking those that are not worth that effort and most likely be part of those FAQs already.
I don't think it's a concern. For as long as copyright law remains all-rights-reserved the free and open movement will need licenses. We should expect that most questions on this site will in some way touch on licensing. But that doesn't mean there can't be (or that there isn't already) a wide variety of questions just within the broad category of licensing itself (and of course other questions remain on topic too):
If there's popular fear, uncertainty and doubt cast about a FLO concept, ask a question about it. (e.g. "Is copyleft anti-commerical?") Answer the question yourself and give a concrete counter-example.
Bonus: The next time you're in an internet argument, link to the question :D
I suppose that the long-term goal here, as for stackoverflow.com itself, is for the site to provide answers to 'practical, answerable' questions. Relatively concrete solutions to relatively concrete problems.
Other than licensing, where might these come from?
We are already seeing some 'community-building' questions. While they can be a bit squishy, the squish can be controlled by applying the standard that answers should be 'backed up' with concrete personal experience.
One could also imagine some 'community destruction' questions, if you'll excuse a humorous way of thinking about forking.
We've seen some questions about the intersection of technologies (version control, testing, build systems) with open source collaboration. From one point of view, an open source project is just an example of a bunch of people scattered all over try to collaborate, so those questions might be viewed as off-topic, but, again, if they are worded to ask for backed-up practical answers, why not?
The recent AV question is again one which straddles a line between 'specific to open source' and 'generic to products with a small(er) audience.'
There's the department of 'how can I make a living building open source.' In my opinion, these would be great if we got answers from people who actually make a living doing open source, and not just people copying and pasting ideology or second-hand stories.
A common theme here is that the range of workable questions depends, ultimately, on the availability of actual experts to answer them. Where by 'expert' I merely mean, 'someone with relevant, practical, personal, experience.'
