Timeline for Possible violation of copyright if question is answered - What is the Community's view?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
9 events
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| May 4, 2019 at 13:47 | comment | added | quid Mod | @HenningMakholm that answer is also by far the most down-voted one. ;-) As usual a lot is a matter of interpretation there. Again a lot depends what the Y is. In the thread one also finds the opinion 'I would go further and say that if the question is peculiar to a particular symbolic math computation system then it is probably not a mathematical question, e.g. questions like "what is the syntax of the command for abc function in system xyz?" is off-topic on MSE (it belongs on the support forum for the particular system).' If you want to revisit the question, raise a new thread. | |
| May 4, 2019 at 13:38 | comment | added | hmakholm left over Monica | @quid: Hmm, the most upvoted answer to that question seems to be unambiguously in favor of allowing such questions. Asaf's answer is more equivocal but still would welcome some "how to do Y in X questions". | |
| May 4, 2019 at 13:26 | comment | added | quid Mod | Sorry for yet another comment @HenningMakholm Here is an old thread math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9073/… with inovelment of various current and former mods. I think basically it's still like that and this is more or less what I meant to convey. | |
| May 4, 2019 at 13:05 | comment | added | quid Mod | Of course there is also some vagueness in the what they "Y" is. I intended it as something quite narrow. "How to plot a $\sin(x^2)$ on given interval in MATLAB?" I doubt that would be considered as acceptable when discussed. (Of course such questions might still get an answer at times. As on other counts, many unsuitable questions still get through.) By contrast, if the question is more mathematically substantive, then it might be different. Note eg the tag excerpt "For mathematical questions about MATLAB; questions purely about [...]" math Q are good, others sent away @HenningMakholm | |
| May 4, 2019 at 13:01 | comment | added | quid Mod | @HenningMakholm The on-topic in the help-center does not match current practice overly well, exactly because it gets hardly ever revised, and if so in local way. It would be in need for an overhaul. In practice questions that amount to support questions are quite often closed of course not always either. I personally don't have very strong feelings about this, but it came up at times. But, yes, as said there may not be universal agreement. But really it's not something to which the site caters, which is documented by the relative scarcity of such questions. | |
| May 4, 2019 at 12:16 | comment | added | hmakholm left over Monica | I'm not sure that "how to do Y in X" is off topic. The help-center list of things that are on topic explicitly lists "Software that mathematicians use (except Mathematica, which has its own Stack Exchange site)" since time immemorial. I wouldn't personally mind seeing those questions go away (though there are not so many of them that they're any real annoyance), but removing them would seem to need more process than an aside in a meta question about something else. | |
| May 4, 2019 at 7:15 | comment | added | orlp | For people scrolling down here, I am not a lawyer, but... Copyright applies to the expression of an idea. You can't copyright an idea itself. That means with regarding programming, the code you produce is copyrighted, the exact documentation is copyrighted, but the idea of your software is not. If someone can write code from scratch that does the same as yours, there is no copyright issue. They might still hold a software patent (unfortunately), but that is separate from copyright. | |
| May 3, 2019 at 8:22 | vote | accept | user0 | ||
| May 2, 2019 at 18:27 | history | answered | quidMod | CC BY-SA 4.0 |