Currently, Stack Exchange offers two different subscription plans to get a Stack Overflow Team website:

  • Teams:

    For any team looking for a secure space for their questions and answers.

  • Enterprise

    For [...] large organizations with enterprise-level security and compliance needs.

I've found several services that offer another type of plan for teams working on open source projects. I guess it's because the companies providing those services feel the need to promote open source projects. So they allow open source project teams free access to their paid services.

Why is Stack Overflow Team not available freely for those types of communities?

In my opinion, it doesn't have anything to do with Stack Exchange getting paid less, for me it appears it much more about not having communities isolate themselves from each other in private websites, leaving the official Stack Overflow with fewer members to participate in the discussions and question & answers.

What are your thoughts on that?

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    Wouldn't an opensource team be better served by having their QA in public, with the rest of the community? – yivi Jun 13 '18 at 12:30
  • Good point, That's what I suggested in my question. However I feel like Stack Overflow is too much crowded with other questions, I can't see an open-source community living in it. – Ivan Jun 13 '18 at 12:46
  • There are already many open-source communities living in it. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of programming questions in SO were about open-source projects. – yivi Jun 13 '18 at 12:50
  • When I say "open source projects" I am speaking of contributors to the actual project not programmers who are using the service that the open source project provides. – Ivan Jun 13 '18 at 13:03
  • We have discussed "Teams for open source" internally, and we might end up building something like it one day. However such a product would probably look quite different than the current iteration of Teams, and as @yivi points out many open source projects are getting along OK using Stack Overflow itself. So for now we're focusing on commercial organisations. – Benjamin Hodgson Jun 13 '18 at 13:03
  • @yivi I would doubt that. It's possible that the majority of questions on the internet about open source projects are on SO (not sure if that's what you meant to say). It's reasonably likely that it's the single site with the most open source programming questions. – Servy Jun 13 '18 at 13:04
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    @Ivan And why do you think discussions over contributions to an open source project would be better served taking place in private, rather than in public? – Servy Jun 13 '18 at 13:05
  • "I feel like Stack Overflow is too much crowded with other questions" Can you clarify how specifically this is a problem? Can you think of any features which would make it easier to navigate the public Q&A site? – Max Jun 13 '18 at 13:05
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    @Max I imagine the biggest problem with an open source community trying to use SO as it's primary source of communication (rather than just to compliment some other primary place for communication) for contributors is that many of their questions would be off topic for the site. They'd need a different type of place for questions about their product that SO doesn't allow. – Servy Jun 13 '18 at 13:06
  • @Servy Actually you're right privacy would be good for those projects. As I said it would isolate them from the rest of the community. But having a separate website (maybe not a website by itself but it could be a page) would help. – Ivan Jun 13 '18 at 13:08
  • @Ivan You've just stated, a second time, that you think having those discussions in private would be good. You have once again not provided a single reason for why those discussions would benefit from taking place in private, rather than in public. – Servy Jun 13 '18 at 13:10
  • @Max, if let's say, I want to get into an open project. I would need to ask questions specifically on the project itself. Others contributors would help me understand the code base better. I believe these kinds of questions would be more suitable on a different SE website because of how SO works. I've seen website proposals on Area 51 for specific projects, they have questions about programming as SO does, but it's centered solely around the project: there are often no technical questions, but rather informative questions. – Ivan Jun 13 '18 at 13:14
  • @Servy so sorry I didn't mean "Actually you're right privacy would be good for those projects" but rather "Actually you're right privacy wouldn't be good for those projects" – Ivan Jun 13 '18 at 13:15
  • Why the downvotes? Does this question look too obvious to be answered? Well if so, please have a go at answering it. – Ivan Jun 13 '18 at 13:17
  • @Max, to give you an example if I want to get q&a about the Firefox project. Typing Firefox (or [Firefox] to get the tag) I would get q&a completely unrelated to the actual project development. That's why I feel for beginner contributors to the Firefox project (not beginner Firefox users) it would be difficult to learn more and find questions relevant to the project's development. – Ivan Jun 13 '18 at 13:26

This is a conversation that's come up a number of times internally during the development and initial launch of Stack Overflow for Teams, so we've definitely thought about. The biggest reason we haven't created an "Open Source" plan is that we've yet to identify exactly what the need and use case for open source projects would be on a private knowledge sharing platform like Stack Overflow for Teams.

As has been pointed out in a number of the comments, most Open Source projects can just use stackoverflow.com's public site today. And for those that the content would be off topic, would benefit more from a Team that was public, rather than one that was private. While we might have something like that in the future, we don't today.

In the mean time, if you are an active maintainer of an Open Source project and you think you could benefit from Stack Overflow for Teams today (the private version as it stands now) or you have thoughts about what you'd like to see from a public version / what doesn't work about the public stackoverflow.com site, feel free to reach out to me directly to chat about it (I'm alex at stackoverflow)

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