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We performed two online surveys of Stack Overflow answerers and visitors to assess their awareness to outdated code and software licenses in Stack Overflow answerers. The answerer survey targeted 607 highly reputed Stack Overflow users and…
Free and open source software is widely used in the creation of software systems, whereas many organisations choose to provide their systems as open source. Open source software carries licenses that determine the conditions under which the…
Developers use Question and Answer (Q&A) websites to exchange knowledge and expertise. Stack Overflow is a popular Q&A website where developers discuss coding problems and share code examples. Although all Stack Overflow posts are free to…
Stack Overflow (SO) is the most popular question-and-answer website for software developers, providing a large amount of copyable code snippets. Using those snippets raises maintenance and legal issues. SO's license (CC BY-SA 3.0) requires…
Stack Overflow (SO) is the most popular question-and-answer website for software developers, providing a large amount of copyable code snippets. Like other software artifacts, code on SO evolves over time, for example when bugs are fixed or…
Stack Overflow (SO) is the largest Q&A website for developers, providing a huge amount of copyable code snippets. Using these snippets raises various maintenance and legal issues. The SO license requires attribution, i.e., referencing the…
Despite the unarguable importance of Stack Overflow (SO) for the daily work of many software developers and despite existing knowledge about the impact of code duplication on software maintainability, the prevalence and implications of code…
Most modern software products incorporate open-source components, requiring development teams to maintain compliance with each component's licenses. Noncompliance can have significant financial, legal, and reputational repercussions.…
Online code clones are code fragments that are copied from software projects or online sources to Stack Overflow as examples. Due to an absence of a checking mechanism after the code has been copied to Stack Overflow, they can become toxic…
When programmers look for how to achieve certain programming tasks, Stack Overflow is a popular destination in search engine results. Over the years, Stack Overflow has accumulated an impressive knowledge base of snippets of code that are…
Deep Learning (DL) models have been widely used to support code completion. These models, once properly trained, can take as input an incomplete code component (e.g., an incomplete function) and predict the missing tokens to finalize it.…
AI assistants can help developers by recommending code to be included in their implementations (e.g., suggesting the implementation of a method from its signature). Although useful, these recommendations may mirror copyleft code available…
As one of the most well-known programmer Q&A websites, Stack Overflow (i.e., SO) is serving tens of thousands of developers every day. Previous work has shown that many developers reuse the code snippets on SO when they find an answer (from…
With an ever-increasing amount of open source software, the popularity of services like GitHub that facilitate code reuse, and common misconceptions about the licensing of open source software, the problem of license violations in the code…
Does the training of large language models potentially infringe upon code licenses? Furthermore, are there any datasets available that can be safely used for training these models without violating such licenses? In our study, we assess the…
Online programming discussion platforms such as Stack Overflow serve as a rich source of information for software developers. Available information include vibrant discussions and oftentimes ready-to-use code snippets. Anecdotes report that…
Software developers often submit questions to technical Q&A sites like Stack Overflow (SO) to resolve code-level problems. In practice, they include example code snippets with questions to explain the programming issues. Existing research…
Clone-and-own is a typical code reuse approach because of its simplicity and efficiency. Cloned software components are maintained independently by a new owner. These clone-and-own operations can be occurred sequentially, that is, cloned…
We study the impact of Stack Overflow code evolution on the stability of prior research findings derived from Stack Overflow data and provide recommendations for future studies. We systematically reviewed papers published between 2005--2023…
Jupyter Notebook is a popular tool among data analysts and scientists for working with data. It provides a way to combine code, documentation, and visualizations in a single, interactive environment, facilitating code reuse. While code…