I have been looking at stacked and it seems that it is marginalizing the heavy financial and intellectual investments made by the creators of Stackoverflow itself. I have been beaten down pretty heavily for bringing up this topic but I think it is an important question programmers, designers, and investors need to consider. I really want to download stacked and roll it out but I cannot think it is the right thing to do. What legal steps should you take to protect your products from open source ripoff? I belive that much of Stackoverflow is innovative and non-obvious to people having skill in the art of programming. Would you pursue patents or different means of protecting your investment? What steps would you take to discourage this practice?
What google did with their CSS & javascript files might be a good start. However, I am not too sure if there's anything else you can do beyond that except for trademark and copyright protections.
By the way, I think patent is a horrible idea.
Large corps usually go for patents - practically every UI in Mac OS X is protected by some pending patent. Due to high cost to obtain patents and even higher investment required to have them enforced in case of infringement (legal expenses can be huge) I suggest you carefully evaluate your situation before attempting to patent something...
Best way to protect your innovative look and feel is to release everything as FOSS. That way, if you for whatever reason become unable or unwilling to continue working on it, or you are no longer the best person to develop it, then others can take over without needing to compromise with you to obtain permission. It's protected even from you, in that it will not suffer for your future failures.
Or did you mean what's the best way to exploit your innovative look and feel for money ;-)
Dons flame-proof pants.
[Btw, if you're worried that using stacked would be unethical in your own mind, you could maybe email Jeff Atwood and ask. If he has no problems with it, then regardless of whether there is in general a case to be made for monopolies on innovative interface designs, this particular case is solved.]
What legal steps should you take to protect your products from open source ripoff?
Same legal steps you should take to prevent anyone from ripping you off. There's nothing specific to Open Source projects that makes it easier for them to break the law; indeed, by opening up the source they've effectively made it easy and cheap to detect blatant copyright violation (when compared to the process of obtaining source for a closed-source project at any rate).
I belive that much of Stackoverflow is innovative and non-obvious to people having skill in the art of programming.
I think you're new to the Internet... ;-P
Seriously, have a look around - the shoulders that SO stands on can be seen all over the place, from the venerable Everything2 and C2 Wiki to Wikipedia and Digg. The innovation in SO is the purpose to which its underlying designs have been put, not the designs themselves.
BTW... Stacked looks almost nothing like SO; I gotta assume you were talking about the mechanics of the site, not the appearance...
What legal steps should you take to protect your products from open source ripoff?
As has been mentioned, it's not specific to open source. Exactly the same comments would apply if the source code for Stacked wasn't available.
I belive that much of Stackoverflow is innovative and non-obvious to people having skill in the art of programming.
I disagree, at least on the 'non-obvious' part. Without wanting to take anything away from Joel and Jeff, it's not totally amazingly different to anything else out there. It's better than it's direct competitors (eg. expertsexchange) and generally very slick and well-done, but the same techniques have been used elsewhere.
Anyway, the short answer to the actual question: Be better than them. Patents etc aren't worth a damn for most companies - they're expensive to register and far more so to defend, and AFAIK there's a strong argument that a look-and-feel isn't patentable anyway. But if your product is better than your competitors, people will use it.
There will always be someone who'll do a similar thing to you, it's called "competition" and it's no bad thing. So, don't spend your time trying to think up some kind of 'protection' for your software - instead, spend it making that software the best in it's market.