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 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.