R devel - Jun 2004 - Survey: "Motivation of Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) Developers"

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

We (Marc R?ttig 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 T?bingen. 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, 28 Jun 2004 22:52:51 +0200, Marc R?ttig <marc-roettig@web.de>
wrote:
>Survey: "Motivation of Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS)
Developers"
>
>We (Marc R?ttig 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 T?bingen. 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/

Your survey is flawed.  In particular, question 6 does not contain any
answer that is acceptable to me:

I think about commercial closed source software ...  

 - I don?t like closed source software at all. Free Software is the
only ethical possibility

 - It's their code, so they get to choose the licence. But I will
never use it

 - Commercial closed source software is is right for the average end
user. But skilled people like me will use Open Source alternatives

 - The majority of software in the future will be some kind of Open
Source

 - The majority of software in the future will be Free Software.

 - Don?t know.  

There's no answer even remotely close to:

 - Sometimes commercial closed source software is the best choice.

I think what you'll find is that 100% of respondents are hard-core
open source supporters, because you don't give them any other choice!

Duncan Murdoch