The Open Source Survey

Over the last months of 2016, we plan to run the biggest survey of the Open Source Software community to date, the results of which will be an open dataset for the community to use and learn from. We hope to answer some of the most pressing questions about open source software, the people that create it, their experience, and their relationship to the industry that depends on it.

Learn more about the survey design and the topics we're studying.

Why is GitHub doing this?

At GitHub our goal is to help everyone build better software. We believe open source code, communities, and principles create better software. As an industry, we know a lot about how open source software is created but very little about the people who create and use it. Are they professional developers, students, or hobbyists?

To build better software, then we need a software community where anyone, regardless of what they look like or where they come from, can participate. This survey will help us see how we, as a community, are doing.

Open data

Open source is bigger than any company or community. The result of this survey will be an open data set released under CC0-1.0 for anyone to use and learn from.

Contributors

This survey is primarily designed and implemented by GitHub:

• @franniez - Data and social scientist at GitHub. New to open source but not to studying people or movements, she's done extensive survey research in Washington D.C, from inside the ivory tower, and within the technology sector.
• @arfon - Program Manager for Open Source Data at GitHub. A lapsed academic with a passion for new models of scientific collaboration, he's used big telescopes to study dust in space, built sequencing pipelines in Cambridge and have engaged millions of people in online citizen science by co-founding the Zooniverse.
• @mlinksva - Open Source Maven at GitHub. A lapsed engineer and non-lawyer with a passion for increasing the efficacy and scope of open production and policy, he is an advisor/director/volunteer for various open initiatives and was previously a manager and technologist at Creative Commons.

This isn't a solo effort for us, these awesome individuals and organizations have helped us design this survey:

• Dr Anna Filippova - Postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, Institute for Software Research
• Open Source Initiative

Check out the contributing guidelines if you want to get involved.

License

Content is released under CC-BY-4.0, which gives you permission to use content for almost any purpose but does not grant you any trademark permissions, so long as you note the license and give credit, such as follows:

Content based on github.com/github/open-source-survey used under the CC-BY-4.0 license.

This means you can use the content in this repository except for GitHub trademarks in your own projects.

When you contribute to this repository you are doing so under the above license.