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

[Duncan Murdoch]

On Mon, 28 Jun 2004 22:52:51 +0200, Marc Röttig <marc-roettig at web.de>
wrote:

>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/


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