[b3morales]

This was one of the promises originally of Stack Overflow: all the content is Creative Commons licensed so that if they "turned evil" (I believe it was Joel that put it this way) the community could, in a way, create a fork. https://web.archive.org/web/20230203170609/https://stackover...

Unfortunately the dumps themselves are not a legal requirement, just a gentleman's agreement, so realistically exercising this ability was still at the whim of the company.

[redbell]

> This was one of the promises originally of Stack Overflow: all the content is Creative Commons licensed

This reminds me of the promise OpenAI was built on. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a bold claim to be respected and too good to be true [0]

0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34979981

[isoprophlex]

Maybe just a gentlemen's agreement, but a nice canary too. Once the dumps stop, it's time to start waving middle fingers and GTFO.

[sshine]

I stopped answering questions when Monica got sacked as a moderator:

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/393046/who-or-what-...

To me, this was the canary. Just another psychopath megacorp.

[theragra]

I always wonder why original founders just sell the company and do something else. Why don't they try to control it more and make sure it stays aligned with needs of society more? Either they can't because of shareholder/equity owners pressure, or they won't, because they really don't care and just said it for PR

[jzb]

I certainly wonder about the "do something else" in the sense of serial entrepreneurs. If I could cash in once I'd be done. If I had enough money to retire on, I would. Run a cat shelter or something.

But the actual answer here is probably a combo of a few things: One, running a company is probably not as much fun as building a company. Much of my career has been "pioneer" roles where nobody else has done the job before. At a certain point, the foundation is laid and the problems to solve are different and often less interesting -- at least to me. It's the build vs. maintain thing.

Two, they started with good and noble intentions. Money got involved. A lot of money got involved. The noble intentions were replaced with reality.

Three, have you met users? As a site grows you have to deal with more and more people and people can be very demanding and not very appreciative. Coupled with the previous factors, I think original founders get burnt out and decide to take the cash and move on. The allure of building anew is too much, the grind of maintenance is too much, and the cash is too good to pass up.

Also four... there's a peak for any site. You often don't know when or how, but you do now that someday your site's maximum value, interest, participation, and all that is going to peak and then decline. Sticking around to fight the good fight may just mean passing up a payday and being left with a declining property nobody wants anymore.

[towawy]

…or they might have determined that they‘d rather spend their time on something else.

Keeping control is a (mostly time) commitment and liability. You have to stay on top of things and actively decide on issues that inadvertently come up.

[Diesel555]

> Either they can't because of shareholder/equity owners pressure, or they won't, because they really don't care and just said it for PR

That is assuming the worst in people. Have you ever wanted to move onto something new? If you make something cool, it is not your lifelong obligation to oversee it.

[strictnein]

The original founders sold the site for $1.8 Billion.

[blihp]

Because despite claims to the contrary most of these sites/projects aren't created for altruistic reasons, they were created to make money (at some point). Cashing out is typically part of the long term plan.

In the case of Stack Overflow, I think the reason for the data dumps was two-fold: one of the original founders (who left long ago) came across as at least idealistic and wanting to do the right thing. The other was pragmatic and most likely always thinking about the money angle. However, the other founder likely also saw the value of the data dumps from a PR standpoint which was quite valuable as they were initially trying to replace expertsexchange.com that paywalled most of the content. IIRC, they discussed the data dumps in the early days of their podcast.

Now that there's big money to be made from machine learning (both the models and the data they are trained on), they've likely decided 'screw it' on the PR value of the data dumps and would rather get some of that sweet, sweet machine learning money.

[sgjohnson]

> I always wonder why original founders just sell the company and do something else.

They typically have millions of reasons. Sometimes billions.

[juujian]

So the idea is that in case leadership wants to 'carve out a kingdom' that is not in line with community wishes, the community could take the data dump and create a clone of sorts? Then now the last snapshot for doing so would be the last data drop from March?

[resolutebat]

Yes. There's moderately successful precedent: Wikivoyage is a fork of Wikitravel, which was went evil after it was sold to a content farm.

[wahnfrieden]

So it's time to community fork?

[b3morales]

Assuming that the linked post is accurate and that the "approval from senior leadership" to turn the dump back on does not come...then yes, I would say so. Actually there is already Codidact, although if I recall correctly they explicitly ruled out importing SE data when they started up. https://codidact.org