Dear Open Source developer
I am doing a research project on "Fun and Software Development" in which I kindly invite you to participate. You will find the online survey under http://fasd.ethz.ch/qgs/. The questionnaire consists of 53 questions and you will need about 15 minutes to complete it.
With the FASD project (Fun and Software Development) we want to define the motivational significance of fun when software developers decide to engage in Open Source projects. What is special about our research project is that a similar survey is planned with software developers in commercial firms. This procedure allows the immediate comparison between the involved individuals and the conditions of production of these two development models. Thus we hope to obtain substantial new insights to the phenomenon of Open Source Development.
With many thanks for your participation, Benno Luthiger
PS: The results of the survey will be published under http://www.isu.unizh.ch/fuehrung/blprojects/FASD/. We have set up the mailing list fasd@webboard.ethz.ch for this study. Please see http://fasd.ethz.ch/qgs/mailinglist_de.html for registration to this mailing list.
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Benno Luthiger Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich 8092 Zurich
Mail: benno.luthiger(at)id.ethz.ch _______________________________________________________________________
On Mon, 3 May 2004 09:13:38 +0200, Benno Luthiger said:
motivational significance of fun when software developers decide to engage in Open Source projects. What is special about our research project is that a similar survey is planned with software developers in commercial firms. This procedure allows the immediate comparison between the involved individuals and the conditions of production of these two development
I don't understand what you are going to achieve. It seems that your study is based on the assumption that Free Software[1] development is an antithesis to commercial software development.
This is wrong: There are quite some commercial companies doing solely commercial development of Free Software (take my company for example or even go back to the late 80ies when Cygnus was founded) and even far more companies doing a mix of proprietary and Free Software.
The way software is developed has nothing to do whether the software is free or non-free nor does the development model (in the public or closed) may be used as an indication for the freedom of the software. ACT for example uses a closed development model; there product the GNU ADA compiler is still Free Software.
Shalom-Salam,
Werner
[1] You used "open source" but I prefer the better term "Free Software"; see http://fsfeurope/documents/whyfs.en.html