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.

Comments

So this is where that spam came from.

[plover]

According to this link, the study was conducted by spamming the Linux Kernel mailing list and random SourceForge developers.

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?"

Professional, in there on opinions

[_wintermute]

Wow, 9/10 Open Source developers are personally convinced that they are 'professionals' who know more than everyone else.

This is news why?

Re:a measly 2%

[mccalli]

I have yet to meet a woman who I would consider a hardcore hacker.

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