All Questions

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! ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Today, we had a visit from Tim Post to discuss our potential name change. After a meeting at Stack Exchange and some discussion in a chatroom, we've nearly settled on our site name: Free & Open......

I want to ask a recommendation for a license to apply to my open project. How do I ask these sorts of questions?

Note: I understand this is very long, but be sure to read and understanding everything in this post. Alright! Day 6 into the beta, and we're about to introduce a new addition to the scope! The ...

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 &...

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 ...

Following this comment, do we want questions to be general, and helpful to as many people as possible, or do we want to also allow more specific questions that help smaller groups of people? I'm ...

The off-topic close reason suggests only software is on topic, which the community appears to disagree with, both on Area 51 and here on Meta. off-topic: This question does not appear to be about ...

So one of the proposed custom close reasons is for external resources questions. It seems to be pretty widely agreed-upon that asking for external resources is a bad thing, and the close reason has ...

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....

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

I've noticed that we have two tags which essentially seem to mean the same thing: [license] and [licensing]. Which one should we keep? Or is there maybe a subtle distinction which might make it worth ...

In chat it was brought up, that the site tends to become political. While I don't think that's the case I may overlook the things, so I ask how the community stands towards it. Also, how should we ...

Being a good SE-citizen I looked at help/on-topic before asking my first question here, to find that this page is just about void of useful information. A basic summary of what is and also is not on ...

We've seen many issues so far on the issue of neutrality between things such as: the Open Source Initiative; the Free Software Foundation; Creative Commons and more; Don't get me wrong, the issue ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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)...

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 ...

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 ...

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?

This question was closed How do I make sure my installer doesn't set off virus scanners? as a dupe of How to give evidence that an open-source project is reputable? Personally, I think ...

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 ...

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 ...

There are some things that are common sense. For example, it's pretty clear that if someone licenses a software program with a free license, then a person using the software has certain freedoms ...

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,...

This question is asking a question that can easily be answered by reading the resources from the well known resources (FSF and OSI). I think such a question is a FAQ regarding Free Software and Open ...

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 ...

Although it seems like we have only just started, in private beta years we've been doing this a long time. How are we doing? Is there anything that we should be doing but are not yet? Are we doing ...

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 ...

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. ...

I've started writing tag wiki's, but I'm getting this: That's the only thing on the page. The link is fine: http://opensource.stackexchange.com/edit-tag-wiki/70 I haven't had any problem editing ...

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 ...

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 ...

Tim Post (Director of Stack Overflow Communities) has visited this site before to help us with the issue of choosing a site name. He and the other staff had ruled out the 'Free & Open' name, but I ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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-...

I use open source software, and I am interested in becoming a contributor, but at present I am not. I think the best expert level questions will come from people who have regular experience at working ...

A few days ago we all agreed that the quality of our questions and answers could use some work. Many of us have been hard at work to fix this, and I feel like we've definitely broadened and thus ...