> So what about SO code snippets?

StackOverflow snippets are mostly licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 or 4.0, so I'd wager that they are not allowed, either.

The SDL source code makes a few references to stackoverflow.com, but the only place I could find an exact copy was where the author explicitly licensed the code under a more permissive license: https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/blob/5bda0ccfb06ea56c1f15a...

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Sharlin 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Most SO snippets likely aren't unique or creative enough to count as works. If a hundred programmers would write essentially the same snippet to solve a problem, it's not copyrightable.

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johndough 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I wouldn't be so sure about that. The famous "rangeCheck" function in the Google vs Oracle lawsuit was only 9 lines: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11722514

	▲	shevy-java 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I don't think this can be used as a counter-argument. Most SO contributions are dead-simple; often just being a link to the documentation or an extended example. I mean just have a look at it. Finding a comparable SO entry that is similar to Google versus Oracle example, is in my opinion much much harder. I have been using SO in the last 10 years a lot for snippets, and most snippets are low quality. (Some are good though; SO still has use cases, even though it kind of aged out now.)

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embedding-shape 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Most SO snippets likely aren't unique or creative enough to count as works.

How is this different from LLM outputs? Literally trained on the output of N programmers so it can give you a snippet of code based on what it has seen.