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