Has Open Source Stack Exchange Failed?

Question

It's been over a year since Phillippe asked this question, and if you look today, 90% of the questions on OSSE are still technical questions about licensing.

Certainly licensing is part of Open Source, but it's frankly a small part, and in addition few attorneys post on this site so answers about license details are of questionable value. I feel like this SE isn't fulfilling its purpose.

We've struggled with similar problems at cooking.SE, where initially 70% of the questions we got were about food spoilage. It took multiple runs at question lotteries with prizes to get the site populated with other types of questions. Maybe we could do something similar for OSSE?

If nothing can be done, I'd argue that OSSE should never come out of beta.

Answer 1

I'm going to address a few points in your question individually:

Certainly licensing is part of Open Source, but it's frankly a small part, and in addition few attorneys post on this site so answers about license details are of questionable value.

Licensing may be a small part, but it's also the trickiest part that I believe brings in a higher number of questions. These questions aren't poor or incorrect by virtue of their topic, and answers to them don't need to be supported by legal qualification. What matters most are answers that are argued and supported, ideally by respectable and authoritative third-party sources. Content policies on Stack Exchange also protect any misinterpretation or other issues with respect to the content that users produce.

A significant portion of our site is based on licensing, with striking parallels between here and Cooking SE. Early stages of beta bring forward numerous artificial questions, and those questions then set precedent and tone for future site development. Questions of management and interaction are organic and when artificial, can be very broad. So it's understandable that licensing became a big deal.

Another issue is that Stack Overflow is a network of technology sites. We have sites for coding, practices, frameworks, cryptocurrencies and so on. People may ask elsewhere. Heck, Stack Overflow still gets tons of questions on the open source tag.

That said, I strongly believe in the need to diversify. However, I don't want to sacrifice question quality for this. Question lotteries and topic contests are successful (especially on Code Golf), and while it might work here, I don't see it. Perhaps we should change areas of the tour page to explicitly include questions of management, interaction, and platform (e.g. Github) usage? I don't know. I am open to any other ideas that pop up - and if you think of any, do post on meta. If we [the mods] believe it warrants lots of discussion and visibility, we'll slap a featured tag on it as well.

Answer 2

Certainly licensing is part of Open Source, but it's frankly a small part

Perhaps, but it's a confusing part, whereas coding, testing, and packaging are common to all software. I think that those of us who've been immersed in free software for years sometimes forget how odd free software licences can look to those who are from a non-free tradition. We've been using these things day-in-day-out for a long time. We have the GPL's licence compatibility table in a well-worn browser tab; some of us may have Bradley Kuhn on speed dial. Not everyone is so immediately familiar with these issues.

Someone once told me that 90% of software written, by lines-of-code, is never released at all, but used only in-house. If that's true, then 90% of professional coders never have to think about licensing of any kind.

and in addition few attorneys post on this site so answers about license details are of questionable value.

I note that Zizouz's excellent answer doesn't accept this as fatal. I find that surprisingly often I can put someone's mind at rest by quoting from eg the FSF FAQ, or an opinion of the SFC, and those are written by lawyers.

I feel like this SE isn't fulfilling its purpose.

I'm sorry about that, but I don't feel that way.

I'll also add that I tried asking a non-license question to try to help this, and immediately got a -1 vote.

I note, however, that it has received a number of upvotes in the interim. I wouldn't attach too much weight to a single drive-by downvoting. Though I do hope you get some answers soon!