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

Not surprising, really...

[mystery_bowler]

A friend of mine who, like me, is a professional software developer once likened programmers to guys who love their cars, they just love to show you what's under the hood.

I mean, really, it doesn't take much poking and prodding around the Internet to find dozens of programmer resource sites, most of which have tons and tons or free code. Programmers, for the most part, feel a sort of comradery (sp?) with each other and as such aren't very hesitant to share their code with other programmers. There have been many occassions where I've gotten a third-party product developer to open up the code base, despite licensing or legal issues, so I could help him/her customize the product to suite my employer's or client's needs.

Also, I believe there comes a time when a professional developer is either experienced or learned enough to understand the "how" of just about any piece of programming, even if they don't have the experise to jump in and do it. For example, I understand how 3d engines work, despite my never having coded one from the ground up (so to speak). I think opening up the code base of your neat-o project is a little easier to take when you realize that other competent developers are going to basically understand how you accomplished what you've done.

As for "weenies" not showing off their code...perhaps they don't have code of their own to show?

I wonder if people have counted the man hours...

[efuseekay]

put into developing, say the Linux kernel...

and figured out how big a company is needed to reproduce that.

Would make a good "tag-line" :). Viz "Linux....developed by a thousand Microsofts....for free."

Re:Very timely study

[gmack]

That's true actually.. most of the flaming I see tends to be from people who don't contribute. And it's not restricted to Linux either I've seen the same in the FreeBSD camp.

Real programmers shut up and let their work speak for them.

Re:Check your links, Timmy

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, I get it now:

Correcting a Slashdot editor = troll

Wow, that's SO simple. Thanks for that. Perhaps you should add it to Slashdot's FAQ!

Good stuff!!!

Inherent in the process?

[PM4RK5]

I don't know about anybody else, but I have only ~8 months of programming
experience, and I feel that I'm relatively proficient. (I know there
are always people better than me, and things to learn - this isn't a flame/troll).

But my point is, I learned most of this stuff myself, and I can't help but
wonder if part of the reason I grasped some of these concepts faster is that
I was able to actually examine Open Source code multiple times to learn how
things were done. So in that way, I was learning from professional programmers,
which in turn, could possibly (most likely) generate more professional
programmers, which due to their background of learning from OSS will probably
also contribute to the OSS community, and some other new programmer will start
the same way.

(Self-fulfilling prophecy?)

this is because the /. doesn't do anything

[Frothy Walrus]

You have to admit, the current generation of computer users, raised on the Web and AIM, isn't of too much use for a lot of things. Years of passive entertainment has dulled their senses, and they would rather the computers played with them than they play with the computers.

There are so many users who are *lost* when the network is down... it's like they don't know what to do with a computer. The past generation knew how to tinker because it was the entertainment... now the spirit's being lossed. It's a good thing the old-timers are so tenacious.

Report may be true

[ahde]

but, if you go back 5 years or more, you will find a completely different demographic.

Most open source developers started in college or before. The maturity level in open source represents the *maturing* of open source. No one has replaced Linus, but there are newcomers like Marcello. Many other projects are still spearheaded by the same people that started them in their basements when they were teenagers. As far as I know, there hasn't been a massive UV radiation die-off, or kidnapping/cyborg replacement program of key developers

a measly 2%

[asparagirl]

I was one of the measly 2% of the survey respondents who was female. (Yes, guys, geek girls do exist- now wipe the slobber off your screen and move along please, nothing to see here.) But where oh where are all the other female open source folks? I mean, I know female CS types are rare, but are they rarer still in the open source world? If so, why?

I'd also be curious to know which *types* of open source projects seem to attract larger-than-usual numbers of women to the contributing ranks. From personal experience, I can say that Post-Nuke, an open source fork of PHP-Nuke, has a fairly high percentage of female participants/developers. But why? Maybe because it's modular and women can go off and work on a module on their own and then go back and submit it later, and thus feel less pressure to need to know all of the ins and outs of every little system. Or maybe it's because it's tempting to play around with modifying the themes/skins (not to get all stereotypical about women being attracted to the GUI end of things while guys do the coding of the guts of the program, but some stereotypes have a good basis in reality). Or maybe because it's a content management system, and women have long had a foothold with online personal publishing or personal communication systems (blogs, online diaries, IM'ing, plain ole personal home pages having long had a sizeable female early adopter contingent- geez, maybe we womenfolk will only pick up a technology if we can use it to *talk*?).

[sigh]

Re:a measly 2%

[cboscari]

I'm a guy, but I ran across this link the other day. Looks like there are many women active with the KDE project at least. I don't know how many there are vs men working on KDE though.
Chris
http://women.kde.org/

Re:a measly 2%

[lkaos]

Well, I have worked with a lot of women programmers (my last project had more women then men oddly enough).

But that's work, and work actually pays money. A lot of guys who work on FS don't really have anything better to do. Any woman _always_ has something better to do :)

Guys are much more desperate than women socially, that just goes without saying.

Without being sexist (although I can already feel my karma dying), I have yet to meet a woman who I would consider a hardcore hacker. It's not so much about skill, but about just shear determination. I just haven't seen any woman who feels passionate about programming. I've met good female programmers, but most of them can just tolerate it.

It's really the same in most math-based sciences. There aren't many female mathematicians or physists, while there are multitudes of female biologists and chemists.

I seem to remember a study done on spatial relation ability between men and women and the results showing that on average, while women tended to have much better memories than men, men had superior spatial relation ability and hence, had a greater natural ability with math and other abstract sciences.

It also seems logic to conclude that with finer senses and better memories, women would excel at sciences that dealt more with observation as biology and chemistry tend to.

I know I've made a ton of generalizations, but I think there is a degree of truth in the difference in intellegence between the sexes. I don't believe that one is more intellegent overall than the other, but that they both are more intellegent in certain fields of study.

Of course, this is just my very humble opinion and there are of course always exceptions. One thing I've always liked about the FS community is that I have yet to encounter _any_ form of discrimination. It's really the only community in the world that is truely non-bias as far as religion, race, and any other factor is concerned. The only thing that matters is ability.

After all that ranting though, here is probably the real reason: Why in the world would _any_ girl want to associate with a bunch of programming geeks?? :)

An important point

[The Cat]

Something that the clueful "corporate project managers" should look at here is that programmers: extremely capable and intelligent programmers who are probably qualified for just about any job, do their best work when they aren't limited by meetings, Gantt charts and unnecessary bureaucracy.

It is extremely unlikely that Linux, Apache, PostgreSQL, etc. could *ever* be developed in a corporate environment. Matter of fact, far simpler projects are seldom completed without a huge effort on the part of the engineers to overcome unnecessary and counterproductive management obstacles.

There's some valuable information here. Of course, it will likely be missed because everyone has to get to the meeting.

Good resource

[woodja]

The benefits of this survey goes well beyond any real numbers. It does a great job illustrating, in very simple terms, what open source is and what makes it possible.

You may want to share it with others outside the Slashdot/Open Source community.

Re:Good stuff

[anonymous_wombat]

I think that a lot of professional software developers end up getting involved in open source projects because they don't get much professional satisfaction from their day jobs. When you have to worry about idiotic management, getting laid off, projects getting cancelled in beta, etc, an open source project starts looking pretty good. I am just waiting to get laid off again, so that I will have some time to do some open source development.

Most interesting number

[Salamander]

I found the most interesting numbers to be on Page 37. There, 19% of respondents admitted that they were stealing time from their employers to write open-source software. Would anyone like to bet on what fraction of the 46% who answered "do not participate at work" were telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? What fraction of the "part of core job" respondents were in the "not known by supervisor" category at some point in their careers?

There are a lot of people who work on open-source software in their spare time. There are quite a few who get paid to do it. Bless them all. However, these numbers seem to indicate that at least 19% and probably much more than a third are regularly working on open-source projects while they're being paid to do something else. Maybe it's time to question whether the equation "open source == moral high ground" has any validity.

Employee Agreement Violations

[Blue Lozenge]

I certainly got a kick out of the fact that 1/5 of the respondents work on open source projects on company time, unbeknownst to their boss. I wonder just how many Employee Agreements contracts have been violated in this way.

If an employer were to discover that their employees worked on these projects on company time, using company equipment, could they have a legal right to close parts of an open project?

Mostly weenies, not pros (LONG & Flame-retard

[rpseguin]

Man, what a drag if that's true.
While I love Linux, UNIX, open source and whatnot and have been using it for a long time, I have to admit that the quality level is sometimes lacking in many areas. I do think that things are getting much better, but we still have a long ways to go.

I know that I am going to get flamed for this, but here goes anyhow.

I have been using unix for over 17 years now and it is my preferred environment (I consider Linux to be yet another flavor of unix).

Here are the things that I feel have set the software/os/apps industry back:

-Microsoft's overbearing presence, huge marketing machine and complete lack of innovation, actually their ability to kill innovation. If M$ weren't around, I think we would be 5+ years ahead of where we are now.

-It has been my belief for a while now that a lot of newbies decide that they want to contribute to existing software.
Now good will and enthusiasm are a great thing to a point, but they cannot overcome certain fundamental language, design, knowledge and wisdom learning curves.
I have written many lines of code in my time, and I'll be the first to admit that a lot of my early, learning-curve code is stuff that I should scrap or rewrite (and I do). However, a lot of the code and ideas that I see out there seem to have the same flavor, and due to the nature of the open source model, they become building blocks for other things. Ugh!
If you're new and don't know the necessary concepts, please do write code and do the necessary learning, but then think about rewriting your code and ideas once you really understand how to do things well.

-Pet/grad-student/research projects becoming mainstream code. I see this a LOT and while I feel that there's a lot of value in the research and algorithms and ideas, I think that a significant amount of cleanup is usually necessary before an idea/app/library/framework/... is ready for primetime.

-lack of focus and cooperation. If you really want to contribute, try to incorporate it into an existing, active project to help make that project better. 1-3 REALLY good projects is WAY better than 50 low-grade "learning" projects. It also gives you exposure to more code and ideas to help you learn.

-the infighting amongst developer camps in unix, open source and other truly innovative forums.
There were/are a LOT of really smart people and good coders and designers. There's also a lot of not-invented-here (TM) syndrome going around, which is really a drag. If people could have swallowed a bit of their ego, come together to make fewer, but more robust toolkits and libraries and whatnot, the rest of the effort could have been invested in making applications. Many of them are very busy writing code to solve applications and may not contribute a lot to the open source community, in general. These are the sorts of folks who you really want overseeing and contributing to projects.

-lack of consistency in user interface. While I hate M$, they have done a great job of keeping a consistent UI, which is good for average users. Geeks are the only people who care about having 10 different GUIs/look-n-feels for doing things. Average users want to be able to recognize a UI element easily.
Consistency is GOOD in UI!!!!!!
Consistency is GOOD in UI!!!!!!
Consistency is GOOD in UI!!!!!!
Consistency is GOOD in UI!!!!!!
Consistency is GOOD in UI!!!!!!

-lack of a good ui toolkit from the X Consortium folks a long time ago. While I agreed initially (when X first came out) that X should specify function and not form, I now believe that the X Consortium should have shipped a much more useful GUI toolkit than Athena, or people should have made Athena more useful and better looking. I've done LOTS of coding in X, Athena, Motif and OpenLook and a dozen other GUI toolkits, and I can tell you now that I wish that I had ONE really good one so I could focus on writing applications that people could use. All these different APIs floating around in my head are eating my brain!

-The current KDE vs GNOME vs ... debate is the same old bullshit. Let's take the best of both and drop it and have one really good, really easy to use, really easy to program and prototype and extend GUI and push that forward. It may be painful now, but in the long run it'll be better for the average user AND for us.

-lack of a truly high-level GUI toolkit early on was no good.

-poor fonts. X Logical Font Descriptor (XLFD) is NOT logical at all. Or rather, it is difficult for joe user to figure out. A real type engine early on would have been a good thing.

-Lack of a benevolent dictator or ARB to help oversee some of these things as standards.

-Too much geek/clique/insider mentality. This is no good. It often feels like a lot of code, docs and man pages are written up by people who feel only insiders are worthy of reading it.

-Too many flavors. Too many unixes, too many GUIs, ...
While I take an abstracted approach and more or less consider most unixes to be the same, I still have to figure out the various annoying differences between the flavors.
Once again, consistency is good for the user!

-Poor to non-existent documentation.
While I am savvy enough to get around and figure things out, but I know many who are not.

Thanks!
-Ralph

With ya there...

[SlashChick]

I'm a geek girl, and interestingly enough my day job is working on a content management system for a large company. I actually do some of the development on the CMS.

I love content management, but I don't particularly like programming. I'm not sure why. I know why I like content management -- scripting allows me to be creative. I love HTML, graphics, and PHP, and I particularly love putting all of those together to form a website. I came from a background of desktop publishing and journalism, and layout has always been my strength.

I like programming in scripting languages like PHP or sh, but I don't like Perl and I don't like hardcore languages like Java and C++. It seems to me that these languages get in my way more than anything else. When I want to write out a SQL result set, I want to just put in a table and drop in some special tags that let me echo out what I found. I don't like JSP's "heavy" syntax. It seems ugly to me. PHP is very elegant and simple, and that is what really appeals to me.

I think that women would have more success in the industry if this industry were more elegant. In general, I believe that women tend to design simple things that perform their function while looking fantastic, while men tend to not care how nice something looks and want function purely over form. This often comes down to men not understanding why, for instance, a lot of women (and a lot of non-geek men!) cringe when faced with a command line. Having come from a writer/artist background, it is important for me to be able to feel comfortable around my computers. I'm not a big fan of "pure power"; I want things that perform well and look nice while doing it.

I hate to say that most geek guys tend to criticize me for these types of feelings. I've been around critical men for long enough that the criticism tends to roll off. However, a lot of guys still don't understand that though I know what a motherboard is, I don't want 47 of them on my living room floor! I don't want my house to look like Star Wars, and I don't want it to look like a museum -- I just want to be comfortable living in it.

I think the programmer contingent will continue to be mostly men because it is not yet elegant. The Linux community will continue to be mostly men because Linux is not yet elegant. But women will thrive in usability groups and design houses where they can make things better and easier to use.

(The above is my opinion, and I don't speak for all the women out there.)

--SlashChick