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

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 up the apostrophes (')!
- Q3 ("should all software be Free?") doesn't distinguish between  software that's distributed and software for internal use.  Thus the  question can be taken to mean "should all software be made available  to the public, and under a free 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 it very carefully,  but also doesn't provide differentiation in the answers.  Neither does  Q15: is internal-use software also counted as "should be F/OSS," i.e.  does this refer to all software a company produces or only to the  software it sells/publishes?
- Maybe Q5 should allow multiple options.  I'd be willing to pay for  software, but it depends on the price _and_ on the license (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 nothing but 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 way to make money from  software is to sell the software itself.  Perhaps you should make clear  whether the pricing question involves 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 software or 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 did they 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 again for an Apache-licensed   project.  In any of those cases, "selling" the software wouldn't mean  that you'd lose your own rights to use, maintain, extend, or distribute  the code.


Jeroen