About OpenSurveys.org

OpenSurveys.org lets you create surveys for your friends, users and customers, then analyse and download the results to see how people responded. This service is provided at no cost: it's free to create an account, it's free to create surveys, it's free to take surveys and it's free to download the results. OpenSurveys.org is, to put it simply, completely free.

OpenSurveys.org is also Free Software, which means that we've made the source code for everyone to download, read, modify, use and even sell if they so wish. If you'd like to download it yourself, click here. We've made it free to benefit the wider community, and also hope that some people will take the time to contribute some improvements back to the site for everyone's benefit.

Why OpenSurveys.org was created

A while ago we noticed how some open source software had dozens and dozens of configuration options, and we started wondering whether people actually used all those options. Wouldn't it be neat if someone wrote a small application that converted a user's options into XML and uploaded them to a website? Developers could quickly get an idea of how popular certain features were, and use that information to improve their user interfaces. Microsoft is already using this technique in Office 2003 and several other programs, but the open source movement doesn't yet have anything similar.

That idea quickly morphed into a more general surveying system, and we decided to make a site where software developers could upload their own surveys for users to fill out. We wanted developers to be able to ask any questions they wanted, specific to their projects, so they could get the feedback they needed to release newer, better software.

Again, that idea opened out even further: why create a site that only programmers could use? A quick search on the internet revealed that several "free" survey sites online limited people to a certain number of questions or features, but offered "premium" accounts to get the extra functionality. So, we decided we ought to produce something that provides all the features people want - programmers or otherwise - free of charge.

And so you're now using the finished product of that brainstorming: OpenSurveys.org. Yes, we hope programmers will make use of the site to learn how users are using their programs, but we also hope it will benefit a much wider audience too.

No commercial use restrictions

OpenSurveys.org is open to everyone, regardless of whether they want to use it for commercial use or otherwise. Our source code is licensed under the GNU General Public License, which means you can take it and use it for your own purposes, whoever you are. In fact, we encourage you to take the code.