Slashdot Mirror
Open Source Developers Mostly Pros, Not Weenies
SpinyNorman writes: "Survey shows open source developers mostly veteran pros, not slashdot weenies. Slashdot weenie Hemos should have submitted this himself already seeing as he was involved in it as LinuxWorld!
Open source a needed outlet for programming pros." Like any survey, it's bound to miss some avenues of exploration, but this is the best look at a large group of open source developers I've seen yet. The survey itself (a joint project of the Boston Consulting Group and Slashdot-parent OSDN) lives at www.osdn.com/bcg, or you can jump straight to it in either PDF or html.
I thought the study was pretty informative and helps dispel some of the preconceived notions of the high school kids in their basements. It's actually 27 year olds in their basements. :-)
This survey could not have been accurate because there wasn't a choice for vote for "Cowboy Neal"!!!!
How does being a software professional preclude one from being a weenie? In high school and college, just about everyone who was a budding computer professional was a weenie.
That's why they call them geeks.
Is it significant that 34% of SourceForge developers responded but only 2.4% of Linux Kernel list subscribers? Does this survey prove anything more than "SourceForge developers are more likely to be successfully trolled than Linux Kernel list subscribers?"
John
Wow, I never would have guessed. So Hemos, do you have a vision of where I'll be in a year? I really would love to know.
And I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners.
Berke Breathed
Real programmers shut up and let their work speak for them.
RMS once wrote Emacs. Now he's an expert on all things. And he won't shut up.
Dear Abby,
My club has an "unofficial" leader who has been an outspoken proponent of our values from time immemorial. Lately, though, his behavior has attitude has become much more strident and he has been very abusive verbally, even towards some of our long-time club members. Abby, can you give us some help?
-- Handcuffed, but Free
I know what a weenie is, (thanks to 7th grade phys-ed), but how are we defining 'Pro'?
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Wow, 9/10 Open Source developers are personally convinced that they are 'professionals' who know more than everyone else.
This is news why?
technoshamanic resistance within hyper-transgressive ontology
I'd bet that they have better grammar and spelling too.
Shadowbearer
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
Anyway, it's not obvious to me that Hemos and OSDN have a vested interest in disproving the myth that the source-code demanding, Microsoft-loathing, won't pat for anything Slashdot audience is the core of free software development and not a bunch of Windows/IE-running posers.
I'm not even sure what a sweeping generalization like this proves other than some of us really like to program.
What sweeping generalization? Did you even look at the results?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Everybody knows that Open Sores developers either clean the grease trap at McDonalds, or if they're resourceful they work drive-thru.
Too right...
"Survey shows open source developers mostly veteran pros, not slashdot weenies. Like any survey, it's bound to miss some avenues of exploration"
Maybe next time they'll get the answer to the other question troubling historians of the browser wars of the 90's...are Netscape engineers weenies ?
It's been my luck to know a couple. However, one of the funniest things I remember was a rather patronising social experiment, done in a psychology course for the Open University. I caught this programme on television - I wasn't part of the course. It's all quite a few years ago now as well - maybe 90/91? Don't know for sure.
The experiment gave an internet connection, via modem, to three women - one in her early twenties and a member of the women's darts team, one a working professional single mother in her mid-forties, and the final one looked like everybody's favourite grandmother.
The woman in her twenties discovered internet chat rooms (yes, plenty were there then. Anyone remember Cheeseplant's House?). The woman in her forties spent time with her child doing educational things. Next came the grandmother.
Of course, everyone expected her to have used the machine as a tea-cosy or something, so it came as rather a shock to find she had been participating in various freeware projects, running technical simulators and tweaking her connection parameters to get better throughput. You could feel the researcher slipping into shock...
Completely without knowing, the team had accidently picked one of the original Colossus team members, and she was putting her sudden luck to good use...
Cheers,
Ian
I selected to be an (amateur) porn actress by day, and an Open Source Software geek at night.
Actually, my job keeps me busy only a few days in the month, so the rest of the time, I'm doing software development with the community.
One needs to make a living and do what they like the most. Luckily, I can do both.
PPA, the girl next door.
-- I feel better now. Thanks for asking.