Point taken, but it still feels like a gray area to me. The value that SO created was the curation of knowledge and high quality discussions that were well indexed and searchable.

The users did provide the data, which is a good point. But there’s a reason SO was so useful to developers and quora was not. It also made it a perfect feeding ground for hungry LLMs.

Then again I’m just guessing that big models are trained on SO. Maybe that’s not true