Our current guidance regarding software licensing can be found here. The current guidance says that a general rule of thumb is that questions answerable by experts in software development are on-topic, while questions that need the expertise of a lawyer are off-topic.

As we practice the craft of software development, we need to understand (at least at a high level) common licenses, especially open-source licenses. Our current guidance specifies that questions should be about the spirit of the license and not the legal nuances or specifics of the license. Questions should also be about the license itself, and not the broader copyright laws that allow for licensing. Finally, the question should be about commonly known licenses that we, as experts in software development, are likely to be exposed to.

In previous discussions of software licensing, we wanted to include it in our scope simply because it was an important topic to us, as software developers. We frequently interact with software and source code generally available on the Internet under a multitude of licenses. Understanding how these licenses work is part of our day-to-day job as we design and build software. At the time, these questions were often a good fit for the Stack Exchange format, and there was no better place to get expert answers to them.

The argument that there is no better place to ask and get answers to software licensing questions is no longer true. Law is a launched site, out of beta. Open Source is still in beta, but is doing OK on many metrics - it's weakest points are in questions per day and visits per day. After browsing both sites, the quality of answers in the realm of software licensing (and in the case of Law, other topics such as intellectual property law, copyright, patents, trade secrets, trademarks, and contracts) on Law and Open Source tends to be of equal, and often greater, than here.

Given this, should we continue to support questions about software licenses here?