The company cannot be trusted to own the server hosting the data dumps.

You (read here and later: the company, just so I can skip a spammy round of "I didn't do anything") want to make access to the data dumps faster. Delightful! Regardless, you must keep the old, independently hosted archive path, because the company can, and the company WILL pull the plug on the data dumps. When that happens, we must not lose access to at least all past data dumps until that point.

Always worth coming back to Joel and Jeff's time:

Oh, expropriation of community content that... We created Stack Overflow to be against it. If there's anything that's more in the DNA of Stack Overflow than that, I don't know what it is. That's one of our most core things. You can see this all over the place in the design of Stack Overflow.

First of all, from day one, we use the CC-wiki license. And it's basically a license, it says that we don't own the content that's on there, which is why we make those database dumps that are available.

Because we wanted to make sure that if no matter what happens, literally no matter who we sell to, or raise money from, or turn the site over to, and even if they take Stack Overflow, and make it an evil site where you have to pay to look at things and there's pop-up ads and pop-under ads, and you know, dancing chariots of fire that cross the screen and punch the monkey, and, man, I can take so many evil things anyway. And it just becomes a big gigantic spam site.

Doesn't matter because just take the latest CC-wiki download that we provided and go start your own site saying, you know what, this is gonna be the clean version. And I think a lot of people will follow you. We very, very deliberately built Stack Overflow in a way that there wouldn't be any chance of locking and we're pretty much doing the same thing with Stack Exchange.

You are making it very easy to pull access to our own content that brings you profit. Even if we trusted the company now, this would make it not just possible, but trivial, for some future nefarious company leadership to backstab the community. And guess what: we already have the nefarious company leadership in the present.

Disabling data dumps uploaded to archive.org or some other third-party, truly independent service is unacceptable.

The company cannot be trusted to own the server hosting the data dumps.

You (read here and later: the company, just so I can skip a spammy round of "I didn't do anything") want to make access to the data dumps faster. Delightful! Regardless, you must keep the old, independently hosted archive path, because the company can, and the company WILL pull the plug on the data dumps. When that happens, we must not lose access to at least all past data dumps until that point.

Always worth coming back to Joel and Jeff's time:

Oh, expropriation of community content that... We created Stack Overflow to be against it. If there's anything that's more in the DNA of Stack Overflow than that, I don't know what it is. That's one of our most core things. You can see this all over the place in the design of Stack Overflow.

First of all, from day one, we use the CC-wiki license. And it's basically a license, it says that we don't own the content that's on there, which is why we make those database dumps that are available.

Because we wanted to make sure that if no matter what happens, literally no matter who we sell to, or raise money from, or turn the site over to, and even if they take Stack Overflow, and make it an evil site where you have to pay to look at things and there's pop-up ads and pop-under ads, and you know, dancing chariots of fire that cross the screen and punch the monkey, and, man, I can take so many evil things anyway. And it just becomes a big gigantic spam site.

Doesn't matter because just take the latest CC-wiki download that we provided and go start your own site saying, you know what, this is gonna be the clean version. And I think a lot of people will follow you. We very, very deliberately built Stack Overflow in a way that there wouldn't be any chance of locking and we're pretty much doing the same thing with Stack Exchange.

You are making it very easy to pull access to our own content that brings you profit. Even if we trusted the company now, this would make it not just possible, but trivial, for some future nefarious company leadership to backstab the community. And guess what: we already have the nefarious company leadership in the present.

Disabling data dumps uploaded to archive.org or some other third-party, truly independent service is unacceptable.

The company cannot be trusted to own the server hosting the data dumps.

You (read here and later: the company, just so I can skip a spammy round of "I didn't do anything") want to make access to the data dumps faster. Delightful! Regardless, you must keep the old, independently hosted archive path, because the company can, and the company WILL pull the plug on the data dumps. When that happens, we must not lose access to at least all past data dumps until that point.

Always worth coming back to Joel and Jeff's time:

Oh, expropriation of community content that... We created Stack Overflow to be against it. If there's anything that's more in the DNA of Stack Overflow than that, I don't know what it is. That's one of our most core things. You can see this all over the place in the design of Stack Overflow.

First of all, from day one, we use the CC-wiki license. And it's basically a license, it says that we don't own the content that's on there, which is why we make those database dumps that are available.

Because we wanted to make sure that if no matter what happens, literally no matter who we sell to, or raise money from, or turn the site over to, and even if they take Stack Overflow, and make it an evil site where you have to pay to look at things and there's pop-up ads and pop-under ads, and you know, dancing chariots of fire that cross the screen and punch the monkey, and, man, I can take so many evil things anyway. And it just becomes a big gigantic spam site.

Doesn't matter because just take the latest CC-wiki download that we provided and go start your own site saying, you know what, this is gonna be the clean version. And I think a lot of people will follow you. We very, very deliberately built Stack Overflow in a way that there wouldn't be any chance of locking and we're pretty much doing the same thing with Stack Exchange.

You are making it very easy to pull access to our own content that brings you profit. Even if we trusted the company now, this would make it not just possible, but trivial, for some future nefarious company leadership to backstab the community. And guess what: we already have the nefarious company leadership in the present.

Disabling data dumps uploaded to archive.org or some other third-party, truly independent service is unacceptable.

The company cannot be trusted to own the server hosting the data dumps.

You (read here and later: the company, just so I can skip a spammy round of "I didn't do anything") want to make access to the data dumps faster. Delightful! Regardless, you must keep the old, independently hosted archive path, because the company can, and the company WILL pull the plug on the data dumps. When that happens, we must not lose access to at least all past data dumps until that point.

Always worth coming back to Joel and Jeff's time:

Oh, expropriation of community content that... We created Stack Overflow to be against it. If there's anything that's more in the DNA of Stack Overflow than that, I don't know what it is. That's one of our most core things. You can see this all over the place in the design of Stack Overflow.

First of all, from day one, we use the CC-wiki license. And it's basically a license, it says that we don't own the content that's on there, which is why we make those database dumps that are available.

Because we wanted to make sure that if no matter what happens, literally no matter who we sell to, or raise money from, or turn the site over to, and even if they take Stack Overflow, and make it an evil site where you have to pay to look at things and there's pop-up ads and pop-under ads, and you know, dancing chariots of fire that cross the screen and punch the monkey, and, man, I can take so many evil things anyway. And it just becomes a big gigantic spam site.

Doesn't matter because just take the latest CC-wiki download that we provided and go start your own site saying, you know what, this is gonna be the clean version. And I think a lot of people will follow you. We very, very deliberately built Stack Overflow in a way that there wouldn't be any chance of locking and we're pretty much doing the same thing with Stack Exchange.

You are making it very easy to pull access to our own content that brings you profit. Even if we trusted the company now, this would make it not just possible, but trivial, for some future nefarious company leadership to backstab the community. And guess what: we already have the nefarious company leadership in the present.

Disabling data dumps uploaded to archive.org or some other third-party, truly independent service is unacceptable.