Stack Overflow: A code laundering platform?

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 access, code examples on Stack Overflow are governed by the Creative Commons Attribute-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license that developers should obey when reusing code from Stack Overflow or posting code to Stack Overflow. In this paper, we conduct a case study with 399 Android apps, to investigate whether developers respect license terms when reusing code from Stack Overflow posts (and the other way around). We found 232 code snippets in 62 Android apps from our dataset that were potentially reused from Stack Overflow, and 1,226 Stack Overflow posts containing code examples that are clones of code released in 68 Android apps, suggesting that developers may have copied the code of these apps to answer Stack Overflow questions. We investigated the licenses of these pieces of code and observed 1,279 cases of potential license violations (related to code posting to Stack overflow or code reuse from Stack overflow). This paper aims to raise the awareness of the software engineering community about potential unethical code reuse activities taking place on Q&A websites like Stack Overflow.

• Publication year

  2017

• Venue

  IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution, and Reengineering

• Publication date

  2017-02-01

• Fields of study

  Computer Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1109/SANER.2017.7884629arXiv 1703.03897
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

• On the Detection of Licenses Violations in the Android Ecosystem

  2016influential reference
• License Usage and Changes: A Large-Scale Study of Java Projects on GitHub

  2015cited by this paper
• When and why developers adopt and change software licenses

  2015cited by this paper
• Mining StackOverflow to turn the IDE into a self-confident programming prompter

  2014cited by this paper
• What are developers talking about? An analysis of topics and trends in Stack Overflow

  2014influential reference
• Understanding the Drivers of Unethical Programming Behavior: The Inappropriate Reuse of Internet-Accessible Code

  2014cited by this paper
• Evaluating Modern Clone Detection Tools

  2014cited by this paper
• StackOverflow and GitHub: Associations between Software Development and Crowdsourced Knowledge

  2013cited by this paper
• Discovering value from community activity on focused question answering sites: a case study of stack overflow

  2012cited by this paper
• License risks from ad hoc reuse of code from the internet

  2011cited by this paper
• The NiCad Clone Detector

  2011cited by this paper
• A sentence-matching method for automatic license identification of source code files

  2010cited by this paper
• Comparison and evaluation of code clone detection techniques and tools: A qualitative approach

  2009cited by this paper
• Knowledge sharing and yahoo answers: everyone knows something

  2008cited by this paper
• Questioning Yahoo! Answers

  2007cited by this paper
• Insights into system-wide code duplication

  2004cited by this paper
• Case Study Research: Design and Methods

  1984cited by this paper

• Coding in a Bubble? Evaluating LLMs in Resolving Context Adaptation Bugs During Code Adaptation

  2026cites this paper
• Knowledge-Driven Reasoning for Compatible and Interpretable API Recommendation via Teacher LLM Distillation

  2025cites this paper
• Using Prompt Tuning to Identify Relevant API Knowledge from API Tutorial and Stack Overflow

  2025cites this paper
• Hot Topics and Common Challenges: An Empirical Study of React Discussions on Stack Overflow

  2025cites this paper
• Open Source, Hidden Costs: A Systematic Literature Review on OSS License Management

  2025influential citation
• A Comparative Study of Full Apps and Lite Apps for Android

  2025cites this paper
• How Do OSS Developers Reuse Architectural Solutions From Q&A Sites: An Empirical Study

  2024cites this paper
• An empirical study of code reuse between GitHub and stack overflow during software development

  2024cites this paper
• “The Law Doesn’t Work Like a Computer”: Exploring Software Licensing Issues Faced by Legal Practitioners

  2024cites this paper
• An exploratory analysis of Community-based Question-Answering Platforms and GPT-3-driven Generative AI: Is it the end of online community-based learning?

  2024cites this paper
• Beyond Dependencies: The Role of Copy-Based Reuse in Open Source Software Development

  2024cites this paper
• A Systematic Mapping Study of Crowd Knowledge Enhanced Software Engineering Research Using Stack Overflow

  2024cites this paper
• Unveiling Python Version Compatibility Challenges in Code Snippets on Stack Overflow

  2024cites this paper
• How Do Developers Adapt Code Snippets to Their Contexts? An Empirical Study of Context-Based Code Snippet Adaptations

  2024cites this paper
• Characterizing Architecture Related Posts and Their Usefulness in Stack Overflow

  2023cites this paper
• Dataset: Copy-based Reuse in Open Source Software

  2023cites this paper
• How is Software Reuse Discussed in Stack Overflow?

  2023cites this paper
• A preliminary empirical study of react library related questions shared on stack overflow

  2023cites this paper
• A Large-Scale Study of IoT Security Weaknesses and Vulnerabilities in the Wild

  2023cites this paper
• How Do Developers Reuse StackOverflow Answers in Their GitHub Projects?

  2023cites this paper
• Exploring Technical Debt in Security Questions on Stack Overflow

  2023cites this paper
• Are We Ready to Embrace Generative AI for Software Q&A?

  2023cites this paper
• PyVerDetector: A Chrome Extension Detecting the Python Version of Stack Overflow Code Snippets

  2023cites this paper
• Machine Learning practices and infrastructures

  2023cites this paper
• PCR-Chain: Partial Code Reuse Assisted by Hierarchical Chaining of Prompts on Frozen Copilot

  2023cites this paper
• A Chain of AI-based Solutions for Resolving FQNs and Fixing Syntax Errors in Partial Code

  2023cites this paper
• On Code Reuse from StackOverflow: An Exploratory Study on Jupyter Notebook

  2023cites this paper
• How are websites used during development and what are the implications for the coding process?

  2023cites this paper
• An Exploratory Study of Analyzing JavaScript Online Code Clones

  2022cites this paper
• A Study of C/C++ Code Weaknesses on Stack Overflow

  2022cites this paper
• Towards Exploring the Code Reuse from Stack Overflow during Software Development

  2022cites this paper
• Studying the Change Histories of Stack Overflow and GitHub Snippets

  2021cites this paper
• Reading Answers on Stack Overflow: Not Enough!

  2021cites this paper
• Are Comments on Stack Overflow Well Organized for Easy Retrieval by Developers?

  2021cites this paper
• An exploratory study on the repeatedly shared external links on Stack Overflow

  2021influential citation
• An empirical study of Q&A websites for game developers

  2021cites this paper
• Detection and Classification of Cross-language Code Clone Types by Filtering the Nodes of ANTLR-generated Parse Tree

  2021cites this paper
• Development of Porting Analyzer to Search Cross-Language Code Clones Using Levenshtein Distance

  2021cites this paper
• Ethics in the mining of software repositories

  2021cites this paper
• Refactoring for reuse: an empirical study

  2021cites this paper
• Code Duplication on Stack Overflow

  2020cites this paper
• SearchSECO: A Worldwide Index of the Open Source Software Ecosystem

  2020cites this paper
• Understanding Privacy-Related Questions on Stack Overflow

  2020cites this paper
• An Empirical Study on Accidental Cross-Project Code Clones

  2020cites this paper
• SemanticCloneBench: A Semantic Code Clone Benchmark using Crowd-Source Knowledge

  2020cites this paper
• Ethical Mining - A Case Study on MSR Mining Challenges

  2020cites this paper
• Gathering GitHub OSS Requirements from Q&A Community: an Empirical Study

  2020cites this paper
• Notes on notebooks: is Jupyter the bringer of jollity?

  2020cites this paper
• Exploring Research Interest in Stack Overflow - A Systematic Mapping Study and Quality Evaluation

  2020influential citation
• CROKAGE: effective solution recommendation for programming tasks by leveraging crowd knowledge

  2020cites this paper
• ASSESSING THE QUALITY OF SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT TUTORIALS AVAILABLE ON THE WEB

  2019influential citation
• A Qualitative Investigation of Insecure Code Propagation from Online Forums

  2019cites this paper
• Siamese: scalable and incremental code clone search via multiple code representations

  2019influential citation
• How Reliable is the Crowdsourced Knowledge of Security Implementation?

  2019cites this paper
• An Empirical Study of C++ Vulnerabilities in Crowd-Sourced Code Examples

  2019influential citation
• Study of the Performance of Various Classifiers in Labeling Non-Functional Requirements ITC 3 / 48

  2019cites this paper
• Software Developers' Work Habits and Expertise: Empirical Studies on Sketching, Code Plagiarism, and Expertise Development

  2019cites this paper
• Large-scale Analysis of Software Reuse for Code and License Changes

  2019influential citation
• Why aren’t regular expressions a lingua franca? an empirical study on the re-use and portability of regular expressions

  2019cites this paper
• Executability of Python Snippets in Stack Overflow

  2019cites this paper
• Characterizing Duplicate Code Snippets between Stack Overflow and Tutorials

  2019cites this paper
• What Edits are Done on the Highly Answered Questions in Stack Overflow? An Empirical Study

  2019cites this paper
• Python Coding Style Compliance on Stack Overflow

  2019cites this paper
• Characterizing Leveraged Stack Overflow Posts

  2019cites this paper
• Analyzing and Supporting Adaptation of Online Code Examples

  2019cites this paper
• Learning-Based Recursive Aggregation of Abstract Syntax Trees for Code Clone Detection

  2019cites this paper
• On Precision of Code Clone Detection Tools

  2019cites this paper
• Usage and attribution of Stack Overflow code snippets in GitHub projects

  2018cites this paper
• SOTorrent: Studying the Origin, Evolution, and Usage of Stack Overflow Code Snippets

  2018cites this paper
• Code similarity and clone search in large-scale source code data

  2018influential citation
• How Do Developers Utilize Source Code from Stack Over(cid:29)ow?

  2018cites this paper
• Code Reuse in Stack Overflow and Popular Open Source Java Projects

  2018cites this paper
• How do developers utilize source code from stack overflow?

  2018influential citation
• Are Code Examples on an Online Q&A Forum Reliable?: A Study of API Misuse on Stack Overflow

  2018cites this paper
• Toxic Code Snippets on Stack Overflow

  2018cites this paper
• SOTorrent: Reconstructing and Analyzing the Evolution of Stack Overflow Posts

  2018cites this paper
• Awareness and Experience of Developers to Outdated and License-Violating Code on Stack Overflow: An Online Survey

  2018influential citation
• The Evolution of Stack Overflow Posts: Reconstruction and Analysis

  2018cites this paper
• FaCoY – A Code-to-Code Search Engine

  2018cites this paper
• Duplicate question detection in stack overflow: A reproducibility study

  2018cites this paper
• How Do Developers Utilize Source Code from Stack Over ow?

  2017influential citation
• Stack Overflow in Github: Any Snippets There?

  2017cites this paper