So...
Expert Sex Change part 2?
Buy it, charge for access and (maybe) profit?
Prosus NV, a Netherlands-based consumer internet conglomerate, on Wednesday said it plans to acquire online Q&A community Stack Overflow for $1.8bn. The deal, scheduled to close by the third quarter of 2021, regulatory approval permitting, is being cast not as a consumer-focused acquisition but as a way for Prosus to expand …
> Buy it, charge for access and (maybe) profit?
To-be-followed-by: All code posted on Stack Overflow is henceforth Copyright © 2021 Prosus NV and Subsidiaries. All Rights Reserved.
Millennials, beware. Copying-and-Pasting Python code from Stack Overflow might get very expensive very soon.
Good thing that all the content is CC BY-SA licensed, so it would be legal to create a fork as long as the original authors are attributed. There are also downloadable full archives available directly from SO, so that simplifies the process.
I hope that everyone would migrate elsewhere if something like that were to happen. But I also think it would be immensely harmful for the stockholders, so I doubt they will kill SO on purpose like that.
Most of it does not work anyway. I believe Russian and Chinese bots are voting for the wrong answers because I often see the correct answer, often ripped right out of the relevant documentation, languishing far below the "accepted answer", with maybe 5-6 upvotes in total.
But, good for Joel Spolsky. Money is nice to have.
... but it is unlikely.
Rather worryingly, anyone spending that much moolah on a site is not doing it as a philanthropic exercise. This usually ends up with the new ownets trying to recover their costs plus an even larger RoI. Luckily stackoverflow is all about freedom so presumably everyone is just going to move somewhere else. Shame though if that wealth of information is lost behind a paywall or some other means of monetisation.
In brief:
They are going to try to recoup their investment and make money off their new property.
This will not work.
The depressing part is that there's all these companies willing to buy things that either make no money or minimal money, then completely fail to convert them into actual useful moneymakers.
I make minimal to no money. Why haven't these companies thrown huge sums of cash at me yet?!
StackOverflow (and presumably Exchange) content is Creative Commons; and may be downloaded from here: https://archive.org/details/stackexchange.
How long the archive will be maintained is anybodies guess, however the existing content cannot be restricted.
anyone spending that much moolah on a site is not doing it as a philanthropic exercise
and (from the article)
Prosus already is involved in education-focused businesses Brainly, Codecademy and Udemy.
Currently the site often says "Your question may be a duplicate of...".
In future it will say "Your question is within the scope of course reference 123ABC. Your access to the answer is withheld until you have completed that course. Have a nice day."
It is a Corporate Zombie Thing, once bitten the victim is Zombiefied and is soon left without any talents!
When I worked for dumb-ass Ericsson, they were buying at least one truly innovative tech business every six month, infest it with dumb-ass Ericsson management thinking, then wonder and whine why the thing they bought can't actually do shit - which it could do before because it was not bogged down by the same dysfunction that makes companies like Ericsson resign to buying up "innovation" instead of doing it.
IBM is the same, only worse.
The real money to be made here may be going to the people selling Stack Overflow who managed to persuade Prosus that it would be a good investment. Would be interesting to know whether those people and the board of directors of Prosus have any common elements.
Yeah I was wondering the same thing. To my understanding Stack Exchange Inc is the company, Stack Overflow is just one of many sites they run on various topics.
So for instance does the purchase include Server Fault, or Super User etc? If not then presumably if they do screw up Stack Overflow you'll just find another new forum appearing with Stack Exchange to replace it.
So Prosus is active in fostering communities. Great. Never heard of them.
Why does this need to be an acquisition ? Can't they just open a channel and throw So some money for maintenance ?
I get that current SO owners are really happy to become millionnaires (btw, way to go guys to confirm that your selling out is going to make you rich), but I fail to see why Prosus needed to acquire SO in order to "reach 1000s more companies".
No company throws a billion dollars around without a firm grasp of how it wants to monetize that. The penny will drop one day, and we'll all go "so that's why".
Meanwhile, Chandrasekar, go on pretending that SO is going to stay independant. Yeah, sure. If you don't know it yet, you'll find out soon enough that your independence is subject to your new master's will, and he spent big money on you. He'll want something out of it.
After the whole mess with the Code of Conduct thrash fire a while back and senseless firing of a long-time moderator during that period, many figured that StackOverflow/StackExchange had already changed in an irreversible way, and not for the better. This purchase, if it goes through, would basically cement that it's perhaps time to move on.
Not sure it's as easy to move on from SO/SE as with e.g. moving away from Freenode, though. Anyone got a good programming forums they'd want to recommend?
While there is a lot of crap on the sites, there is an awful lot of useful information and the barrier to entry is very low. Companies have for years been chasing knowledge management systems and SO is one of the best I've seen compared with all the chat-based shit out there.
As for Prosus, it's doing a little bit better than Softbank.
While many of you have focused on the familiar trope of the Stack Exchange community, like ctl-c coding and moderator hell, I'll take a moment and say what a tremendous resource these communities have been. The late nights I have spent, eyeballs deep in problems at work, googling obscure technical errata on Server Fault or Super User. Slightly different communities from SO, ones where a single deep link and short explanation can save hours, and pain(What is the Reg standard unit of Pain? Probalbly shouldn't go straight for bullet and or pepsis wasp pain. Maybe stubbed my pinky toe on the bedframe, or stepped on a four sided die?). I have been saved from the horrible pitfalls of otherwise undocumented Apple wireless compatibility bugs, referenced an obscure cisco command I use once a decade, and (for the 5th time) relearned that a one liner bash command that uses both awk and sed.
I'm afraid that the loss of this site could actually shave a couple of points off of global GDP in the short term. The fact that this was in the works before Freenode makes me even more uneasy, as well as the boilerplate announcement of "No current changes". I'd be more at ease if they cam in with a roadmap of what their planning. Not telling me upfront makes me thing that either they don't have a solid plan(unlikely, but would mean SE gets ruined my idiots) or that they know I won't like it(SE is ruined by asshats).
As a contributor with lots of brownie points I get to post and edit questions on "Meta Stack Overflow".
I noticed there were no questions about how the proposed sell off would affect the site.
So I posted my own question. Admittedly the title "Are we being sold down the river" did break a number of rules, but the post never appeared and was never officially closed.
You are usually told your question is closed and given specific reasons by the moderators but the question just disappeared without trace.
While I congratulate Joel et al on grabbing more loot than they could ever dream of its a pity that this useful and well run site will go the way of MySpace, AOL, Slashdot etc. if the history of tech takeovers repeats itself.
There is no way I can see that the suckers/investors can monitize the site enough to recoup their Billion dollars.
While I will freely give my time helping some poor Indian youth struggle with the sort of COBOL I churned out in my long ago youth. (If nothing else it may reduce the number of banking outages!). I am not going to do it so some South African money men can benefit from my generosity.
All the rules and guidelines on SO refer to the "community". Such a thing cannot exist in a blatantly
capitalist money making machine.