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FLOSS Developer Survey Results Published

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the actual-research?-you-gotta-be-kidding dept.

grex writes "The FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software) study from the University of Maastricht has published its final report. One of its five parts is the developer survey based basically on developers from the European Union. Results show that Debian is the preferred distribution, GNOME the desktop the majority choose and vi more popular than Emacs. But this survey also handles economic, law-related and motivation aspects among developers that make it very interesting to read."

3 of 158 comments (clear)

  1. Gnome over KDE? by zmalone · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The difference between the two is only ~2%, in Gnomes favor. This out of of a group of a little over 2200, I don't know if I would consider that a large enough percentage to consider it to be anything other then a margin of error.

  2. Flawed Survey by Arandir · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This survey consisted entirely of self-selected participants. The surveyors actually seemed to boast that they didn't select anyone themselves. This study is bogus and proves nothing.

    The staggering support for Debian (48%!) only proves that Debian developers are more successful in recruiting other Debian developers to participate in bogus online survey's. This isn't a dig against Debian, it's a dig against the silly methodology of this study.

    This survey, despite its seemingly thoroughness, is no more valid than the weekly Slashdot Poll. The only conclusion that can be drawn from this survey is that Debian, GNOME and vi users are more likely to participate in a self-selected survey than Redhat, SuSE, Mandrake, KDE and emacs users.

    --
    A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
  3. Self-selected sample by rubinson · · Score: 5, Insightful
    The problem with these results is that the sample was self-selected. Whoever wanted to respond to the survey could. So, these results don't tell us anything about the Free Software development community as a whole; rather it just tells us about those people who knew about the survey and chose to respond to it.

    Debian Weekly News comments on this in their latest issue:

    The FLOSS (see below) survey is finished and the results were posted. The most interesting bit is the number of Debian users among the participants, however, since we pointed out that survey, we may have contributed a little bit to the trend...