I don't get this attitude toward SO. Most of the people who go there get the answers they seek, including experts with questions outside their domain of expertise.
I hear all sorts of people fretting about how to give back to the community to make their lives more meaningful. Isn't this an ideal win/win?
Stackoverflow is not a community, it's a business, and their business is reselling that sense of community to third parties.
I've no quarrel with Stackoverflow, it's a very nice site and a useful project. I do have a quarrel with people whose brains seem to turn off once anything 'Web2.0' is involved. Just because it's on the web doesn't mean that the laws of economics and common sense no longer apply.
Because to survive as a business SO needs to sell your sense of 'comunity' to a third-party resource.
Not that there's anything wrong with that, just be aware that when you're participating on SO you're only a 'human resource', to be marketed and sold sometime later in the future. Hopefully SO is run by decent guys and the buyer will be ethical.
By "sell" you're implying that the sense of community is in some way diminished by selling advertising. I don't find this to be the case, unless it leads to a conflict of interest (i.e. SO deletes all Linux articles at the behest of Microsoft).
Now if you were to use "capitalize on", "monetize", or one of the many verbs that don't imply a transfer of ownership, then I would agree with you.
There's no value in SO's database of questions and answers, they might as well give it away under whatever liberal license they want.
The real business value of SO is the engaged ("community") web traffic it receives. ("Community" == "higher ad CPM" and "highly contextual advertising" in business terms.)
Implementing a paywall would be rather pointless, since that's a very bad way to monetize traffic.
However, StackOverflow can make big money by cleverly partnering with corporations: instead of a site that answers "how do I do XYZ with ABC toolkit" they could gradually shift to a site that answers "doing XYZ with BigCorp ExpensiveSolution: how I increased ROI and fixed my dental problems".
The point is that between "comunity" and "traffic monetization" there is a clear and obvious conflict of interest, and it's pretty obvious which side of this conflict will be taken by SO's sponsors.
Incidentally, this is also exactly why Wikipedia doesn't display ads or monetize traffic.
At which point someone would download the complete StackExchange data dump[1], import it into one of the dozens of SE engine clones like Shapado and compete with them without having to bootstrap the content.
Problem is data and engine just being available does not take care of everything.
First, someone has to decide to offer this as a service to other people. Nothing assures that.
He then would have to upload the data on his servers and have S.O. grade server setup, that costs a fortune, to serve all the traffic.
Then there would be the problem of transferring the actual user accounts and their credit and status.
So, this line of argument (you can always get the data out and serve them) is more like the classic "it's open source, you can fork it if they choose do something you don't like". Sorry, but this is only realistic if you have the knowledge AND the resources to do so.
But the fact that they make the dumps available shows that they do in fact "give a flying @#$! about the community" and they don't "only care about keeping the community happy enough that they keep giving them intellectual property for imaginary currency so they can sell it for real currency".
The community would be happy enough by just getting a decent alternative to EE - the data licensing and dumps go well over and beyond that.
The blog post is essentially criticizing them not for something they did, but for having the mere possibility of doing something to screw up the community, even when they took important steps to reduce that risk. Seems completely unfair to me.
Nobody is saying "StackOverflow gives you a one-click tool to create their competitor sites!" They're just saying that 1) SO has made it impossible for themselves to set up a paywall around the content and 2) if they go evil, it's POSSIBLE to take your data and leave. The fact that they have open sourced some of their tools and that competing frameworks already exist make this easier, but no, still not easy.
But is that SO's fault? What more could SO do to earn your trust? And what alternative to SO do you propose?
