> And what's to say Stack Overflow won't become like EE some day, and start holding answers hostage?
Joel and Jeff have explicitly tackled that issue in the podcast, with reference to IMDB and CDDB as well as "the hyphen site". All the user generated content on Stack Overflow is licensed under cc-wiki and available as an anonymised data dump. http://bit.ly/cGWxT5
If that were to happen, someone could fork the site using the last CC-licensed data dump. I would hope that would happen immediately upon any change in licensing away from CC/GPL/GFDL/similar.
It's not impossible but they can't just make off with the data in the way that CDDB did.
(Now, if you want to talk about a company abusing the community ... look at Yelp.)
Joel and Jeff have explicitly tackled that issue in the podcast, with reference to IMDB and CDDB as well as "the hyphen site". All the user generated content on Stack Overflow is licensed under cc-wiki and available as an anonymised data dump. http://bit.ly/cGWxT5