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.
Just my US$2e-02. OK,
- B
http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
most open source zealots are damn good coders, and yes, many of them even have jobs and a house/apartment!
Everything was great until I came across this: Most open source zealots haven't written a line of code in their life. Most open source authors are pragmatic and appreciate the benefits in particular areas, and their approach is anything but zealotry. There is a vast chasm of difference between the attitudes of a Slashdot Warrior advocating the true way of enlightenment, and the people who are behind the usable open source.
How many times do you get to work on something really creative at your day job?
Most work is either database, accounting, or doing web apps with some really broken methodology/tool.
The most fun I have had is working on non-work realated things just for the sake of writing some fun code.
and they didnt want to learn it, unless they HAD to. The older guys out there all seem to pretty much love linux, since alot of them have worked with unixes for along time. And is very athome on a linux system, whilest most younger programmers come from a Windows backgroup(most danish schools use windows systems) and maybe they feel abit scared in changing OSes. And more importantly, they dont really know the strenght in *nixes. Since they where never thaught, they only know that MS insist that thier OS does everything a unixbox does, just easier. So, why boughter right?
/dev/).
Heck, it was a older guy who got me interested in linux by showing me what it was about(via. a perlscript that used system() to rip encode mp3s).
I instantly saw the coolness in commandline programs, and then he showed me about how easy it was to dump a midi sysex to a mididevice (aka. the wicked coolness of
So, my point.. i think the reason that more older guys are involved in linux, is many of them are very used/comftible with *nix system.
This study is meaningless.
Hi we sent email to sourceforge members, and linux kernel mailing list members, and got a lots of numbers.
First, the response rate from Sourceforge was 34.2%, which is not representative of most of sourceforge. How many of those contacted were in active development? How many alpha projects are there on sourceforge that have had little development, and will continue with little development?
Second, there was only a 2.4% response by the lkml members. Would this 2.4% be the active members of the list, or mainly the people that don't participate?
Third, this only accounts for people on sourceforge projects or linux, which may not be representative of all open source projects. Yes it would be very difficult to survey more members, but how do we know that sourceforge members and linux hackers are not different than other projects?
Fourth, there listing of open source principles(slide 8) is only representative of a specific group of open source developers. The intellectual property ideas("Free speech, not free beer", and copyleft) don't apply to people not using the gpl. This may mis-represent the people who participated in the survey.
This survey is much more useful if, instead of claiming to represent all open source developers, it admitted to being primarily about linux/gpl developers. Or if more information was given about what projects(activity, license, and activity by developer) the participants of the sourceforge survey were involved in.
The survey is interesting if looked at in relation only to the sourceforge community, but is not able to be applied to all open source developers.
--xPhase
The following sentence is TRUE. The previous sentence is FALSE.
It's the pros who do the actual work. It's the weenies who sit around and bash Microsoft while pontificating and arguing the subtleties of the GPL vs. whatever or Linux vs. BSD on Slashdot all day.
I actually recieved this email (I run a project on sourceforge). I didn't fill it out, but I had thought about it.
They did some good trolling.. they refered to the project by name, said that the project was related to the survey they were doing, etc etc.
As far as the 34% of SF developers versus 2.4% of the LK list... that's easy. Not everyone who reads the Linux Kernel mailing list is a developer.. but nearly everyone who runs a sourceforge project is.
there is a difference between hacking and writing good code. Hacking is making something work at the expense of maintainability and scalability,
writing good code starts with knowing how to design, 14 years old can't match design skills
of Microsoft Pros
On page 7, the authors make a distinction between three groups: "leadership", "virtual teams", and "user developers". Their selection methods seem to be skewed toward identifying many of the first group, somewhat less of the second, and relatively few of the third. I wonder - I really wonder - how their findings wrt motivation, experience level, or licit/illicit use of work time might be different if they'd managed to capture a more balanced cross-section of the three categories. Heck, it would help even to have an estimate in hand of the relative numbers of people in each category. At the very least, BCG should have asked in the survey which category the respondent felt best represented their own role in their open-source project(s).
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
I've been told by many managers that it is good to expect 33% true productivity from employees in a cube farm environment. People make personal calls, answer email, talk by the water cooler, etc.
Now, a good manager recongizes that this is ok. It's good for moral. If the biggest compliant of an FS programmer is that he spends some time at the office hacking away at a bug or scribbling some code on a notepad while the other goobers are talking about what they saw on Survivor, then that's a damn good thing because atleast the FS programmer is becoming a better programmer and will likely become even more productive.
Besides, since most FS programmers have a bit of experience (according to the article), it is likely to assume that they have enough experience to know how much they can get away with doing at work without work suffering.
Think of it this way, if your a manager would you rather see your C++ programmers spending an hour talking about the Super Bowl or spending an hour figuring out a non-work related bug in a C++ program that is FS and could therefore be used by the company in some way in the future?
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
It's also somewhat flawed; I don't know how representative Sourceforge members are of open-source programmers in general.
Plus I'm a little suspicious of some of these answers. Most polling groups have discovered that people tend to a) give answers that make them look good, and b) give answers that they think the poll-takers want to hear. "I do it for the intellectual challenge" sounds a lot better than "I do it because I have self-esteem problems and really need to see my name in the credits of a program".
Not quite - you are learning from the code of professional programmers, not the programmers themselves. The big difference doesn't show up in your code but in your documentation, design and process skills. Initial coding is only a very minor part of the battle of creating great software, the rest is in the design and maintenance and looking at code will teach you very little about documentation requirements.
You can certainly pick up some aspects of design from code directly, but don't fool yourself into thinking you are competent at design if you have only learnt from code - it really is an artform. Probably the biggest failing of open source software is in it's documentation (ie: there is extremely little and documentation is almost always behind). I am definitely not one to support producing copious amounts of wasted paper but I am well aware of how much difference a solid design, fully planned before any code is written, can benefit productivity in the long run.
So by all means participate in open source development and learn from the code, you will learn vast amounts about code that way but don't stop there. Go out and get a degree in software engineering (or something else that focusses on design and maintenance since you already know how to code well), read as many books and white papers on software design as you can or better yet, do both (and whatever else you can find).
I know there are always people better than me, and things to learn
That's the spirit! There is some really cool stuff coming out in white papers these days both relating to code and design - keep an eye out for Genetic Software Engineering from the Software Quality Institute they're doing some really cool stuff.
Maybe if we all go out and study up on design and management (yes, yes, but it's important even in opensource) the next survey will show that open source developers are brilliant at code, design and make the best managers.... Or maybe that's pushing it.....
...which just goes to show the kind of people that Slashdot really attracts.
There's a Mercedes gap too. I want one and can't afford one, but it's not government's job to do anything about it.