Like the small-town mayor who suddenly finds herself running an entire state, our ambitions for Stack Overflow keep growing. Our original idea of making the Internet a better place to get expert answers to your programming questions suddenly seemed too small. Programming questions? We asked. Why just programming questions? Why not every question under the sun? And who says we can’t run for Vice President of the United States of America?

We tried making our software available as a hosted white label product called Stack Exchange. We thought that other people would create awesome sites on every imaginable topic. Some people did (yay!), but it wasn’t the flood of high quality sites we were hoping for.

So we’re making a few changes. Briefly:

1. Stack Exchange will now be free.
2. We’re changing the way that new Stack Exchange sites are created to move to a more democratic, community process.
3. The content of these new, community-created Stack Exchange sites will be publicly owned under a Creative Commons license, instead of being owned by individuals or businesses.

If you’ve already created a Stack Exchange site, be sure to read the announcement in more detail to hear about our transition plan. Don’t be alarmed; we’d never do anything to mess with Stack Exchange sites that are already working.
Getting better answers

As programmers, we’ve gotten used to the clean, fast, reliable answers that you get from Stack Overflow, so whenever we try to get an answer to a tax question, or a Siberian Husky question, or an iPhone question, it’s incredibly frustrating to find old conversations, trapped in forum and discussion software, instead of answers. Forums are optimized for conversation and shooting the breeze, not for getting answers, so they suck when you actually need some information.

During the last week of meetings, we’ve been talking about our company ideals, our core values, and our core goal. We came up with a new, very ambitious company goal:

Make the Internet a better place to get expert answers to your questions.

That’s a pretty big task, but we know that the great software we created is up to it.

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