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#ICOPY BOT LICENSE CODE#

#ICOPY BOT LICENSE SOFTWARE#

If you want to hear about how we built the software modal and physical keyboard behind our April Fools joke, check out the podcast below.Īs someone who has been unapologetically copying from Stack Overflow for years, I was not surprised to see the millions of copy events rolling in. That’s the high level TL DR, but for folks who want a deep dive into all the things we learned while studying the copy data, please read on for some marvelous insights and charts from David Gibson, a data analyst on our product marketing team. Beyond that, we encourage everyone to share in the benefits of what the community has created.

#ICOPY BOT LICENSE CODE#

And of course, be aware that some code requires a certain license to use. You should still follow some basic best practices to prevent bugs or safety issues from sneaking into your code when copying, so make sure you educate yourself before grabbing and pasting. You can stand on the shoulders of giants and use their prior lessons learned to build new things of value. Our whole site runs on knowledge reuse – it’s the altruistic mentorship that makes Stack Overflow such a powerful community. Knowledge reuse isn’t a bad thing – it helps you learn, get working code faster, and reduces your frustration.

So, if you’ve ever felt bad about copying code from our site instead of writing it from scratch, forgive yourself! Why recreate the wheel when someone else has done the hard work? We call this knowledge reuse – you’re reusing what others have already learned, created, and proven. People copy from code blocks more than ten times as often as they do from the surrounding text, and surprisingly, we see more copies being made on questions without accepted answers than we do on questions which are accepted. People copy from answers about ten times as often as they do from questions and about 35 times as often as they do from comments. That adds up to 40,623,987 copies across 7,305,042 posts and comments between March 26th and April 9th. One out of every four users who visits a Stack Overflow question copies something within five minutes of hitting the page. We were able to catalog every copy command made on Stack Overflow over the course of two weeks, and here’s what we found. Once we set up a system to react every time someone typed Command+C, we realized there was also an opportunity to learn about how people use our site. Ok, jokes over, hope everyone had a good laugh and no one got too freaked out. What would the world look like if we suddenly decided to monetize the act of copying code from Stack Overflow? Our company was inspired by the founders frustration with websites that kept answers to coding questions behind paywalls. We wanted to embrace a classic Stack Overflow meme and tweak one of our core principles. In the case of our recent April Fools gag, it might be more like an entire cob, perhaps a bushel of truth. They say there’s a kernel of truth behind every joke.

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