Thread: Survey: "Motivation of Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) Developers"

Survey: "Motivation of Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) Developers"

We (Marc Röttig and Carl-Daniel Hailfinger) are currently working
on a survey on the motivation of open source developers as part of
a "Computer Science and Society" project at the CS department of the
University of Tübingen. We invite every developer in the Free / Open
Source Software community to help us with our survey by filling out
a little web form to give us some hints on possible motivation-motifs
of F/OSS-developers.

You can find the survey-form at
                    http://foss.ta-altensteig.de/


Privacy statement:
We do not want to collect personal information about you without
your agreement. That's why we do not ask for your name and give
you the ability to leave personal information unspecified (age
and profession). We (the authors) will not make the raw survey
data available to anyone except members of our faculty for
verification of proper scientific procedures in extracting the
results.


Thank you in advance for your support. You can reach our CS faculty at
                   http://informatik.uni-tuebingen.de/

On Mon, Jun 28, 2004 at 10:50:53PM +0200, Marc R?ttig wrote:
> Survey: "Motivation of Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) Developers"

Some remarks:
- Although the MIME header doesn't say it, the document is encoded in a  Windows-specific encoding.  This is screwing
upthe apostrophes (')!
 
- Q3 ("should all software be Free?") doesn't distinguish between  software that's distributed and software for
internaluse.  Thus the  question can be taken to mean "should all software be made available  to the public, and under
afree or open-source license?" but also, at a  stretch, "are free licenses the only ethical way to distribute
software?" The two are very different, yet the difference does not  come up anywhere in the answers... Q6 does phrase
itvery carefully,  but also doesn't provide differentiation in the answers.  Neither does  Q15: is internal-use
softwarealso counted as "should be F/OSS," i.e.  does this refer to all software a company produces or only to the
softwareit sells/publishes?
 
- Maybe Q5 should allow multiple options.  I'd be willing to pay for  software, but it depends on the price _and_ on
thelicense (or as you  put it, "only if I get the source.")
 
- The phrasing in Q10 is a bit awkward.  For instance, "I only feel joy  when coding" can mean either (a) "I feel
nothingbut joy while coding"  or (b) "I get my only joy in life from coding."
 
- Also in Q10, I think "pensum" should be "quota" in English.
- Q18 ("if you build your own company on your software, how would you set  your prices?") seems to assume that the only
wayto make money from  software is to sell the software itself.  Perhaps you should make clear  whether the pricing
questioninvolves only the software or also any  services etc. related to the software.  The answers you get may be very
different, e.g. because it's pointless to charge high prices for freely  available software.  Yet e.g. developing the
softwareor providing  consultancy about it is a different matter.
 
- Q19 unfortunately is a bit vague when it comes to how software may be  "sold."  Take SCO for an example: what exactly
didthey buy when they  "acquired Novell's Unix business"?  In the case of a BSD-licensed project  like PostgreSQL of
course,a company could already package, modify and  sell the product without buying anything.  I would interpret "sell
all the software" differently for a BSD-licensed project than I would for a  GPL'ed project.  And it might be different
againfor an Apache-licensed   project.  In any of those cases, "selling" the software wouldn't mean  that you'd lose
yourown rights to use, maintain, extend, or distribute  the code.
 


Jeroen