The Free/Libre/Open Source Software Survey for 2003

aWaterman writes "FLOSS-US is an online survey of Open Source/Free Software developers currently being conducted by researchers at Stanford University's Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation. This survey has been designed to complement the FLOSS survey for 2002 of Open Source/Free Software developer communities sponsored by the European Commission. FLOSS-US asks questions on some of the topics addressed by the original FLOSS survey, plus questions on several other important issues, including open source developers' motivations and expectations, usage of licenses and programming tools, individuals' contributions to projects, and support by proprietary software firms. If you are an Open Source/Free Software developer, please click here to fill out the questionnaire. We greatly appreciate your viewpoints and your responses to our survey questions."

Not very well written

[mbrubeck]

I took the original (European) FLOSS last year, and was impressed at the amount of thought that obviously went into crafting the survey. FLOSS-US seems less polished, and much more annoying to fill out even though it was quite a bit shorter than FLOSS.

There were several questions that many developers might not be able to answer accurately (total lines of code in a project, lines of code in personal contributions), and some that required extra research by the survey-taker (select all the licenses your development tools fall under). Some questions were annoyingly redundant ("I launched my current project," yes/no? ... Did you launch your current project?). Others forced you to answer inaccurately, like the questions asking "how much time did you spend on this?" where "none" was not an option. Also, the use of HTML forms was annoying, like having a <select multiple> with size="1", making it nearly impossible to use my browser.

Also, the questions seemed so arbitrary and unsystematic that I'm not sure how useful the results will be, even if they were accurate.

Re: Not very well written

[Black Parrot]

> FLOSS-US seems less polished, and much more annoying to fill out even though it was quite a bit shorter than FLOSS

Good points. However, given the source of the survey I think it may be worth filling out anyway. It may have an impact on public policy.