Questions tagged [discussion]
The question you're asking is designed to solicit opinions or best-practices on a particular topic, with the goal of reaching community consensus.
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Is open source limited to software?
In open source, are we talking only about software, or also about other things? There is free documentation (GFDL, Creative Commons), open data (already has its own Stack Exchange site), open recipes....
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Alternative site name brainstorming
Since there are still many people unsatisfied with the current site name, I thought it would be good to have a centralised place for some brainstorming. If you have any ideas, please post them below! ...
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Vote Early, Vote Often!
Note: This post is identical to this one on Vi & Vim stack exchange
I would like to echo a post that Scott Morrison made on Meta.Tex.SE:
I'm a moderator from MathOverflow, and this "question&...
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Who should moderate this site?
Ideally Moderators are elected by the community, but until this site reaches a critical mass to hold an election, we will be appointing some provisional Moderators to fill that role.
We need your ...
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Free Software in the description, please?
See this post on area51.
To some people, there is an important distinction between Free Software and Open Source Software, at a philosophical level. I'm not really interested in having that fight ...
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More site name brainstorming - Part III
In episode 1, we discussed changing the site name. A pretty much consensual answer proposed Free & Open.
In episode 2, it was revealed that there is no longer a consensus. The proposal for “Free &...
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Are NC & ND Creative Commons licenses on topic?
Creative Commons produce a family of related licenses. Most of these are Open licenses (not recommended for software) and are clearly on topic. A couple are not Open, but are very closely related to ...
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Are historical questions on topic?
Should questions about the history of the open source idea or open source projects be on topic? The closest I've seen to one is How could using code released under CC0 infringe on the author's ...
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Are licensing posts going to dominate Open Source?
After looking in the "Tags" page on the main site... I've noticed that out of the top 5 tags, 3 of them are licensing tags (license, creative-commons, and licensing)... The top tag on the site being ...
user144
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Do we want questions about "What are open source alternatives to X"?
I've seen the following question: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/219/40
And I wanted to have this particular policy discussed early.
Do we want question like: "What are open source software ...
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How far into legal questions do we stray?
Questions like Can I change the caps to lowercase in licenses? and Do software patents for common formats (gif, mp3, h264) apply globally? are legal questions that impact open source software.
To ...
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How to encourage questions about anything but licenses?
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.
What other ...
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Community Promotion Ads [duplicate]
We recently entered public beta, so we need to get word out to the rest of Stack Exchange about Open Source Stack Exchange. One of the best ways of doing this is with Community Promotion Ads.
Here is ...
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Are questions on hosting platforms on-topic?
I found this: How can I recover content from an open source project host that has shut down?
It seems to be asking about how to recover information from a hosting service that has fallen. It asks ...
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OSI and Open Source SE
According to this Area 51 Discussion Post, the Open Source Initiative was contacted regarding the use of their logo. In the end, the OSI was interested in promoting this site, hoping to use it to ...
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Does using the phrase 'open source' in a question make it on-topic?
This is the flip side of Questions that only arise in an open source context
Consider this question: Do you need a degree to become an open source developer? (which I am using simply as an example)
...
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Let's use the tag "drm" instead of "digital-rights-management"
I propose to use drm instead of digital-rights-management. Reasons:
It shorter.
It is open to be interpreted as "Digital Restrictions Management", a term of importance for the Free Software movement. ...
user490
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What, exactly, are moderators doing to review reviewers?
In a recent meta post, which has since changed dramatically so many comments are no longer on topic there, a moderator said a few things that I feel need to be discussed.
The following quotes are ...
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Should we reach out to all organizations?
Earlier this evening, many members of the community participated in chat with a representative (for lack of a better word that comes to mind) from the Open Source Initiative.
Having been initially ...
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How comes the most popular question from the definition phase got closed as too broad?
During the definition phase, the highest voted example question of this site proposal was:
What's the difference between the MIT and the BSD license?
with 19 upvotes and 1 downvote.
Naturally, ...
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Are technical questions about specific software that happens to be open source on-topic?
Let us say I have a question about an open source project that looks something like:
Hi! I am a newbie user of XYZ. So, while I was referring to XYZ's API doc, I couldn't understand what function ...
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What should we name our chatroom?
The default was Open Source, I, on a whim, changed it to The MIT License.
Let's let the community decide, how should we name our chatroom?
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Moderator Pro Tem Announcement
Throughout the beta, we need members from the site whose focus is to engage the community, both in community-building issues and site management. That's why we select a few members from each community ...
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Please Write Tag Wikis
We're in the phase of the site where almost everyone can create new tags. However, there's an important part of a tag that often gets missed out when they get created: the wiki.
I have a rule for ...
ArtOfCodeMod
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Advertising Open Source - Community Ads for 2016
It's 2016, and the new 300px-wide sidebar has just rolled out network wide. When that's complete, graduated sites around the network will start to run new community ad cycles.
To be ready for them, ...
ArtOfCodeMod
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Are questions about collaborative development on-topic
I haven't found our site's "mission statement" yet, so consider this another step in developing one.
Will we consider questions about collaborative development in general to be on-topic.
Although ...
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Should questions pertaining to open knowledge be in scope
Recently, How can I trust Wikipedia, if everyone can change it? was asked. I feel questions like this pertaining to open knowledge should be in the scope of this site (even if it isn't necessarily now)...
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License recommendations
Intro: Contrary to popular belief, recommendation questions can work well on Stack Exchange. See for instance Software Recommendations, where questions and answers are of high quality.
QUESTION: ...
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Winter Bash 2016 is almost here - do we want to participate?
Like last year, I have an email from Stack Exchange, telling me that Winter Bash 2016 is ready, and will start on 19 December.
Because previous years have seen such a positive response, the default ...
ArtOfCodeMod
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Would this question about motivation for open source work be on-topic here?
What is the incentive for curl to release the library for free? (screenshot) was asked two days ago in Stack Overflow. In brief, it got an answer from the author of curl, made it to Hot Network ...
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Beyond licensing
I feel that one of the main draws of Open Source Stack Exchange are discussions around licensing.
These are of course essential to free and open source software but they are not all of it.
How ...
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How do we avoid "free as beer" vs "free as speech" confusions?
I saw a question about the categorization of "free software", assumed that the author means "free as beer" and answered it. The author commented that he meant to ask about the "free as speech" meaning ...
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Stay Bright! A wake up call to moderators
I'm starting to get a bit of the heebiejeebies of the recent communications of our moderator team.
https://opensource.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/641/stay-bright-a-wake-up-call-to-reviewers, ...
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The Quality Cleanup Initiative: Improving our quality
There have been a few discussions among the community concerning the direction of quality standard that this site has in place. As a result, we need to start creating a standard of quality, and most ...
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What urgent matters do we need to resolve?
What this post is for
Some issues we face as a community are more urgent than others. We can ask meta-questions about them, upvote those meta questions and the mods can feature some of those meta-...
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Let's evaluate our progress!
Since Community site self-evaluations were shut down last year, there hasn't been any replacement for them, which leaves it down to us to evaluate our own progress.
Therefore, I propose that we do ...
ArtOfCodeMod
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Should we allow "What's the difference between <license A> and <license B>" types of questions?
Do we find them on topic? There are sites out there dedicated to do this comparison and are able to visually display it a lot better than we ever can.
Perhaps a single canonical explaining how to ...
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Will "software" be an implicit tag for every question not categorized in another way?
Prior to the beta launch, there was discussion of whether this site would be limited in scope to open source software. The strong consensus was behind an answer that argues:
If the scope does not ...
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Discussing scope overhauls with Programmers SE
Earlier today, a few moderators (myself included) had a chat about site overlap and scope reform across various sites. Before I continue, let me make note of a highly related post:
Revisiting what is ...
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How do we improve our stats?
Looking at our report card on Area 51, I see the following numbers today:
1.7 Questions/day
100% Answered
98 Avid users
1670 registered users
2.1 Answers/question
138 visits per day.
The first and ...
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How frequently should I say "I am not a lawyer"?
I have seen people add "I am not a lawyer" and similar disclaimers on this and other stacks. Personally, I wouldn't take legal advice from someone unless they said "I am a lawyer (and my hourly fee is ...
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free-software, fsf, free-software-definition and other associated tags
For both the FSF and OSI we have a few set of related tags:
free-software, fsf, free-software-definition
osi, open-source-definition
I created the two -definition tags, as I thought they were more ...
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Do we want to allow question about specific open source products?
Differences between Firefox and Iceweasel is a question that isn't directly about open source, but rather about an open source product. This is not exactly included in our scope as it is, but could ...
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Can we provide a general reference for people wanting to get started with Open Source/Free Software development?
We've had two questions so far that have asked how to get started with Open Source, namely:
What are the best ways to get involved with open source projects?
Open source Projects : How should I start ...
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What should our site goals be?
After some small amount of discussion on this meta post and here in chat, I have a question for the community here.
What are our goals?
As a Stack Exchange site, we're here to answer on-topic ...
ArtOfCodeMod
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Where is [old arcane project] now maintained, maybe as a fork under another name?
Imagine a highly-specific open source library whose website has disappeared, or has been abandoned. Is it on-topic to ask whether the project still lives somewhere else, maybe as a fork under another ...
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Are getting started questions relevant here?
Now that we have this network, I'm sure there'll be newbies coming in asking questions like,
How do I get started with Mozilla/KDE/etc?
or
How do I start contributing to project xyz?
I guess ...
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Scavenging questions on-topic in the site from other SE sites
As a follow up on my previous question Should questions regarding licenses and usage of OSS from other sites be migrated here
Should we start re-posting questions from SO which are tagged as ...
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Should we just allow open source?
In the question Are NC Creative Commons licenses on topic? I argued that the NC-clause of Creative Commons (and ND for that matter) isn't conforming to Open Source (while CC-BY and CC-SA are). But in ...
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What are the canonical questions we've discovered?
We've created, appointed, or otherwise identified certain question/answer pairs that are the canonical answer for certain problems. These are answers where the community has said all it is going to ...
MadHatterMod
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