FLOSS Developer Survey Results Published

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."

Comments

Gnome over KDE?

[zmalone]

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.

Executive summary

[tmark]

Results show that Debian is the preferred distribution, GNOME the desktop the majority choose and vi more popular than Emacs.

So what you're saying is, these guys spent a ton of money to produce a giant troll ? Did they happen to say to whether Britney Spears is hotter than Shakira, or which Star Trek TV series was best ?

ITS OFFICIAL!

[Eric_Cartman_South_P]

Great! So it's official! Emacs sucks and vi is best!

q

Q

:qq

;quit

;alt_ctrl_del

;F4

;sh!t how do I exit this post?

Flawed Survey

[Arandir]

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.

Self-selected sample

[rubinson]

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...

Other survey results...

[Bonker]

62.3% of Linux users have a (warezed) Windows 2000 partition so that they can play Warcraft III

59.3% of Linux users prefer 'slender, young looking' anime babes to 'busty, voluptuous' anime babes.

only 22.3% of Linux users really think Natalie Portman is all the good looking, even in tight white spandex. Most were just thankful that JarJar only got 2 scenes.

93.2% of Linux users who read Slashdot have JonKatz permanently filtered.

32.3% - Boxers
44.1% - Tighty Whiteys
22.3% - Flappin' in the wind, baby!

62% of Linux users think that 'man' is a threatening name for a documentation application since it's vaguely homoerotic.

58.3% of Linux users think that all polls about free software are orchestrated by Microsoft and are unwilling to trust the results, even if they are positive.

Re:Other survey results...

[liquidsin]

28.6% of poll respondents were confused by the lack of a "Cowboy Neal" option.