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I wonder if there is a 2nd, informal license for anything with low stakes & high transaction costs:

"Anyone can do anything they'd like with this code because no one can stop anyone"

It is like "CC BY SA" for software is social norms, except in the cloths of legal licensing/law. People will follow them, but for social reasons, like general goodwill & so you don't get snubbed at parties, not for any threat of legal enforcement.

What a mess. People copying code-of-unknown-license they don't own to SO, so that people who think it is CC BY SA will use it- https://stackoverflow.com/a/5310215/33264

More CC BY SA pedantry... so if I use an SO answer, the writer, editors, commentators probably all need mention. Does the original question writer need similar citation, to fairly use the answer? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So the gnu AUTHORS file assumes every contributor will have a publicly available email address, on stackoverflow, they explicitly designed the system to hide email. So contact is either checking bio for email, or chasing down contact via twitter/github/personal website.

The AUTHORS format imagines none of this, so at best, I list user name, maybe an email & up to 4 URLs for contact info. I should go read CC BY SA to see if anywhere it implies that the name should let you contact the author.