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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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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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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Are questions about the licences of popular open source projects on-topic here?
I have a question I want to ask about the license of Ruby (MRI), and what portions of the project it covers (specifically, I'm wondering whether or not it covers bundled gems which are distributed in ...
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Shall requests for "free stuff" be on-topic as long as it is free stuff for open source?
I voted to close this question as off topic: Free mailing list provider for open source projects?
Looking at the votes, it looks like we've a hung jury, so I'll take it to meta.
I gave this as my ...
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What should the Tour's '(Don't) ask about' section contain?
In the tour site there is a section 'Get answers to practical, detailed questions'. There are two lists: 'Ask about...' and 'Don't ask about...'. These lists can now be edited by the appointed ...
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What should our site-description be?
We have mods now, that can change a lot of things, among them the site-description in the tour.
It currently reads:
Open Source Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for
people organizing,...
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[tag:development], what's it for?
We have a good number of questions tagged development. I don't really get what it's for. The tag wiki explains
Use this tag for questions regarding the development of open projects.
So what are we ...
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Is this question really off-topic?
While looking at some closed questions to generate some stats, I came across this question. It asks how to apply a Creative Commons license to a blog post.
It's been closed as off-topic: not about ...
ArtOfCodeMod
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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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Legal principles and a generic 'XY' problem
It seems to me that some questions here suffer from an 'XY' problem resulting from fundamental legal principles. Copyright and patent law is civil, not criminal, law. Unless countries start passing ...
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Can we rename dual-licensing to multi-licensing?
It may not be common, but I'm raising this post to hear the community thoughts:
From the dual-licensing excerpt (emphasis mine):
Works can be released under two (or more) licenses, which may or ...
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Tag merge request: derived-works, derivatives, derivative-works
It seems the tags derivative-works, derived-works and derivatives are all used for the same thing. Should the latter two be superseded with the first? Should either of the first two be retained as ...
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How do we determine if a license recommendation is off-topic scope wise?
We're accepting license recommendation questions as a part of the scope of the site. A close reason has already been proposed for questions that lack sufficient information:
Questions asking for ...
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Should very general questions that can be answered with no more than quoting external resources be on-topic?
This question:
https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1322/what-is-github-i-know-it-is-a-site-but-what-do-you-use-it-for
prompted me to ask this.
The answer can be found quite easy in the ...
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Let's have a new feature: No [feature-requests]!
On this post: Closing an inactive feature request?
There are two tags currently on the question: issue-tracking and feature-requests.
issue-tracking looks like an excellent tag to me, but then what ...
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Should we allow license comprehension questions?
Questions concerning the comprehension of clauses specific to licenses, might be considered to be off-topic as asking for legal advice. Should we allow these sorts of questions?
For example:
What ...
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Q&A Format shortfall - When a question needs to be a discussion
My question on plugins has reminded me of the failing of a strict Q&A format. The inability to have a dialogue with the people answering the question.
Yes, there are options like chat, email, and ...
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Are questions about Open Data and Open Standards on-topic?
I found Open Data StackExchange site which follows Open Definition. So, I would like to ask whether it is on-topic here or not? In other words, Is there a case that questions on this site should be ...
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How to discourage "chameleon questions"?
Sometimes, when you answer a question, the person asking it realizes that the answer is not what they wanted, and the changes the question in a way that renders the already given valid answer invalid.
...
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Questions about general copyright law should be off-topic
How does Github's "forking right" cope with an "All rights reserved" project?
I will start by offering the view that this question is off-topic. If code is sitting on github ...
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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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Would major FLOSS announcements be on topic?
To scope this question, I stress the word major in the title.
If we want this site to be the first resort for people looking for general information about open/free projects and content creation, it ...
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How is photographic licensing off-topic?
How is Google able to relicense their photos on Google Streetview, which may contain copyrighted content?
There's the question: It's +2/-1 and the answer is 0/-1
According to this, we allow ...
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Can we change the off-topic reason text? [duplicate]
The main off topic reason (the generic one that every site has) currently reads this on this site:
This question does not appear to be about open source software, within the scope defined in the ...
ArtOfCodeMod
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Importance of the difference between open source and free software
The fight that was happening earlier in chat, was in parts about the significance of the difference between open source and free software. So what's about that?
Practical view: Looking at it from an ...
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Please, be civil!
An normal constructive discussion in chat at some point escalated and became a personal fight. In my opinion we have place for constructive discussions, even if the participants have strongly ...
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Are we getting "Good Subjective, Bad Subjective" right?
Quite a bit of our questions have (at least at some point) been closed as primarily opinion-based. I adapted a query that shows all posts that were closed with that reason, ranked by total votes. At ...
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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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Status of reaching out to organizations besides OSI
Some time ago it was asked and affirmed that this site should reach out to organizations beside OSI. Some of us committed to this task.
What is the status of this reaching out?
Has contact been made?...
user490
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What's the policy on editing "technical" terms?
I recently made a review that you can find here (Note that the "Emacs" spelling changes were made after I had done the review). Also note that the author subsequently approved of the edit.
The edit ...
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Are questions about specific open source projects on-topic? [duplicate]
Are questions about specific open source projects on-topic? I mean questions like:
Why is project X the way it is and not other?
Where can I get support for project Y?
Why did project A split into B ...
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Custom close reasons for this site?
We are currently running with a default set of reasons to VTC a question, or for flagging.
Should we also have some custom reasons? If so what might be suitable?
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Can this site run on the proprietary platform SE?
Applying my question on the main site to this site itself:
Can this site, which is trying to be a community for Free Software (besides other topics), run on a proprietary platform (SE)?
Which part ...
user490
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Should we copy answers from the GNU GPL FAQ
(Follow up to Should we copy questions from the GNU GPL FAQ):
I noticed the answers copy verbatim of entries of the GNU GPL FAQ.
Should we get content for this website by simply mirroring content ...
user490
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Let's not answer FAQs
Most questions about licensing that have a relation to the GNU licenses are already answered in the extensive Frequently Asked Questions about the GNU Licenses. But almost none of the answers to such ...
user490
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Should we copy questions from the GNU GPL FAQ
I noticed the question How to license program output? which is a verbatim copy of an entry of the GNU GPL FAQ. Naturally, the current top answer also quotes said entry of the FAQ.
Should we get ...
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Change tag linux-distribution to gnu-linux-distribution
The tag linux-distribution should be renamed to gnu-linux-distribution.
Reasons: Virtually all distributions running the Linux kernel run a lot of software developed under the GNU project.
See also ...
user490
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Isn't 'Is there research about [X]?' the same thing as 'I want an external resource'?
There are questions on the home page looking for research studies. Are these - like any other 'external resource' questions on the network - off topic?
The questions are
Are there any metrics/papers/...
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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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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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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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Does a question need to include source code to be on topic?
There is a comment on this question suggesting that the question should be closed. I was very surprised by the reason given:
I'm fairly certain that since this does not involve any sample of code, ...
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How is this question off-topic?
I stumbled on this question about the infamous case of Google and Oracle, concerning the integration of Java and Android. I've edited the question, but here is the original:
As many people know, ...
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The student involvement question looks like a list question to me, why shouldn't it be closed?
In what ways can students get involved in Open Source?
What are some other similar programs for students to get started?
This looks like a classic open-ended list question, which are considered ...
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Question in the context of my project: Is it spam to put a link?
I have this question about a particular problem that arose in the context of my open source project.
It is a presumably rare issue, that most people would not believe can exist. At least, I don't ...
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How do we make sure that wording of questions and answers is kept unambiguous?
I'm seeing some questions and answers that contain ambiguous wording - for example, the use of "use" and "using" in the meaning of "licensing my software under a specific license" or keeping a project ...
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Should "does statistical data for [X] exist" be off topic?
I have seen many questions where people have ask a question with this formula.
I while it may be difficult to the person asking the question to find this data the goal of this website is not to ...
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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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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 questions regarding licenses and usage of OSS from other sites be migrated here
I was looking for an answer to a concern of mine and occasionally found it in StackOverflow and it is closed as off-topic which it is there, but I think that the question is pretty on topic in here. ...