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Comment by timmorgan | Hacker News Reader

Experts Exchange is actually a decent resource once you realize you can scroll to the bottom of the page to get the answer.

Yes, I realize their tactics are nasty, but for all those answers to simply disappear from the web would be a shame.

Ideal would be for Stack Overflow to buy them out and import all their existing content.

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did you look at the traffic graph? SO overtook EE and is still growing--no incentive to buy them. SO users will replicate the content anyway.

Eventually, perhaps. But I happen to know there is A LOT of Microsoft SQL Server and MS Exchange help on there that can be found no where else -- well, at least nowhere outside of a 100 page technet article of some of the deepest technicalese you have ever read.

And what's to say Stack Overflow won't become like EE some day, and start holding answers hostage? EE wasn't always this way you know... [edit: I realize this is a completely different line of thinking -- it just popped into my head]

> 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

right, but if/when they take VC funding they start down a path leading to loss of control, and a future CEO may lock future contributions.

Then you can create a more open alternative and import their data legally.

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.)

From the beginning, Stack Overflow has pledged to not be evil. http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/03/whos-your-arch-enem... EE did used to have nicer policies, that's how they got all that good will that convinced users to do all that work, and fill in all those good answers.

yep I can confirm this, if you ever try to do some MS Exchange programming I guarantee you will: A) Have a lot of questions B) Will find most of your answers on EE not on SO.

SO is better for finding iPhone or C# related answers.

And what's to say Stack Overflow won't become like EE some day, and start holding answers hostage?

At worst they could only hold new answers hostage. All of the existing questions and answers, every single one of them, is licensed under cc-wiki and is made available to the public via data dumps on bittorrent. You can quite literally download all of the question and answer data for all of Stack Overflow, if they turn evil you can host your own site with all of the old data, or someone else could. The latest data dump was 11 days ago: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/category/cc-wiki-dump/

I'm not so sure about that. SO users are quick to answer simple/easy problems but those are never the ones I need help with. Ask a question that requires a lot of expertise and some effort to answer, and it's nothing but crickets chirping, whereas if I'm lucky enough that someone already had my problem on EX, it is usually answered fully, even if it took 3 people multiple tries and a lot of effort to get there.

Not to say that I'd ever pay for EX, but it obviously has its uses...

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