Stack Overflow to charge LLM developers for access to its coding content

Following up on the parent, for those who don't already know, EE = ExpertsExchange, an older question-answer website that got strong Google SEO for the questions but eventually hid the actual answers behind a paywall. If you wanted to see the answer, you had to pay. StackOverflow was, at least partially, a reaction to that in the beginning.

There was initially some confusion about the license behind the answers, and they went through some license-spinning (https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing).

Now, most things at StackOverflow (and the other StackExchange websites) are under CC BY-SA 3.0 or 4.0. Important to point out that there is no ban on training in any of those licenses, probably because they were written before that was even a thing. However, regardless (and the obligatory IANAL), that attribution clause should certainly be included, if it was directly derivative of the code on SO. (How to track thousands of attributions across a large codebase is another question.)

Whether closing down the API is abiding by the spirit of the license is an open question, but it certainly seems to be allowed by the letter of the license.

My personal feeling is that this is rowing upstream, and that the large and incredibly-well-funded companies like OpenAI, Claude, Google, and Meta have already scraped all of that historical data, so this really only hurts the new startups that are poorly funded. However, I'm sure that making this deal with Google et al will be a good thing for Stack Exchange as a whole and perhaps the funding will breathe new life into Stack Overflow (et al).