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FLOSS 2013: the Survey For Open Source Contributors, a Decade Later

Posted by Soulskill on from the how-big-of-a-jerk-is-your-project's-maintainer? dept.

grex writes "In 2002, the first FLOSS survey was launched. With over 2,500 participants, it was the first large survey of open source developers around the world and had a major impact in the community, academia and politics. Over 10 years later, a group of researchers is replicating this survey in order to see how the community has changed. This time not only developers, but all kind of contributors to open source projects are asked to participate. How has the community changed in this last 10 years? Are the views the same? Is its composition and focus similar? These types of questions, among others, are the ones this survey is looking to answer (so far with over 1,000 respondents)."

8 of 27 comments (clear)

  1. Not enough application success stories by Camembert · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I am a regular user of open source. I am not a programmer. Obviously it has been successful in linux kernel stuff. But while there are a number of successful end user application projects, there could be many more. The one thing that is frustrating for me is how many interesting projects die when the primary programmer moves on. Also I find it a pity that several open source programmers work on competing projects, which often get left behind. Imagine if they had pulled forces together - like on the most succesful project such as VLC, it simply does not seem necessary to start your own variant project of these. At the risk of getting flak, I always found it such a waste to have both KDE and GNOME desktop and overlapping related apps projects. Both are of course rather succesful, but imagine what the current status would be if people had stayed with one project instead.

    1. Re:Not enough application success stories by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      To give you an idea of how open source software works and the forces at play, without getting into specifics I will tell you the history of a project of mine.

      Like all lazy programmers, I didn't just decide to write code. Instead I was led there because I was using some software and it didn't do things the way I wanted them done. I got involved in the mailing list and explained what I wanted to do, offering my services to do it. Nobody else was keen on doing things the way I wanted them done, so I decided not to argue and to set up a competing project. Eventually, my project had all the functionality of the first one and worked better (in my estimation).

      While I was working on my project, another project started up. They liked what I was doing, but wanted to work on a more portable platform. I wasn't interested in doing a rewrite, but wished them well. Eventually, their project had all the functionality that my project had. They also had more programmers on their project because their project was more popular (being more portable). I shut down my project and recommended that people using my code move to the new project.

      The original project that I proposed changes to still exists, but almost everyone has moved to the newest system. I suspect that the person running the original project only keeps it going because he likes to tinker with it and it does everything that he needs. Everyone is happy and we have a much better ecosystem because new ideas could be tried without having to convince the old guard. I would argue strongly that the friendly competition that existed between our projects -- using the best ideas and ignoring the bad ones -- greatly enhanced the exploration of the problem space.

      I would likewise argue that if we had all pitched in on the original project that we would never have gotten such a good system in the end. This situation is far from uncommon. You see it in virtually every open source project around. It is one of the best things about it.

    2. Re:Not enough application success stories by Raumkraut · · Score: 2

      If everyone worked together on a single tool for each job, we'd likely have a bunch of tools which are bloated, complicated, try to be everything to everyone, and end up being useful to nobody.
      Some projects might be wildly more successful than others, but that doesn't mean that one is a fundamentally better solution than the other, or that the less-successful one is pointless or useless. It just means that more people prefer one over the other.

      Why is it seen as good that we have choice and competition in mobile operating systems and devices, for example, but so often not that there exists a choice in desktop software?

    3. Re:Not enough application success stories by blackest_k · · Score: 2

      Choice is good and not having to choose is also good.
      Thats the best aspect of KDE and Gnome. As a user you might choose one of these as a base desktop environment others are available but your still free to pick up the applications that you want to use.

      I'd bet most users (who have a choice) use a mixture of Kde and Gnome applications.

      Kde seems to be making some advances in supporting touch and making the view part of MVC more flexible and why shouldn't it be this way wimp and touch interfaces have differing requirements. Gnome seems to not be moving much in this direction if at all but thats fine by me only my tablet has a touch-screen so far.

      With Microsoft backing touch with windows 8 (love it or hate it) and the kinect bringing gestures into play its likely our hardware is going to be supporting touch and gestures in our not too distant futures. Voice too if we can overcome the embarrassment and the recognition becoming accurate enough to not wind the user up.

      With 2 or more teams with alternative view points quite different applications and desktops are developed. One teams idea's may work better than another which may inspire another team to steal, as in take that idea and turn it into their own.

      Imagine a world where the choice wasn't between kde and gnome but say unity was the one and only linux desktop whats your option then windows?

      Even with windows you have windows 7 and windows 8 even Microsoft gets the need to have choice. They might prefer everyone to move to windows 8 but they still have to support 7 for a good while yet.

           

      --
      Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
    4. Re:Not enough application success stories by Camembert · · Score: 2

      Oh, I know that, it is a nice theory. However in many cases we end up with many half-finished applications for roughly the same functionality instead of one neat app. Gnome and KDE are each quite succesful but they and their apps could have been 4 years further in the evolution if there was one desktop. In my opinion!

    5. Re:Not enough application success stories by __aaltlg1547 · · Score: 2

      To me, this is a big problem. There's a great deal less development of applications. There are tons of productivity projects that are years, sometimes a decade or more, out of date compared to commercial applications. Frequently they've been left in a halfassed, marginally functional state. Largely, the open source community has failed to deliver on FSF's vision of free software for the masses, unless the free software you want happens to a Linux desktop or an Android phone or some works-pretty-well-but-not-as-well-as-Microsoft office software.

      The reason seems obvious: open-source programmers work on whatever they want. They want to work on what's hot so they all gravitate to current hot projects and everything else gets left by the wayside. Meanwhile commercial companies with customers who pay work on software they can sell to people who need software to make complicated tasks easy to do.

      But seriously folks, how many programming languages do we need? Do we have enough already? Did we have enough already 15 years ago?

      I think it will be this way for a long time. Maybe forever. What might change is that we'll see commercial software companies take more of an interest in making their programs work on Linux and FreeBSD desktops instead of or in addition to Windows and Macintosh.

    6. Re:Not enough application success stories by Vyse+of+Arcadia · · Score: 2

      At the risk of getting flak, I always found it such a waste to have both KDE and GNOME desktop and overlapping related apps projects. Both are of course rather succesful, but imagine what the current status would be if people had stayed with one project instead.

      Well, the reason there's both KDE and GNOME needs a little historical context. KDE relied (and still does) heavily on the then-closed Qt toolkit. The authors of GNOME wanted to build something basically like KDE, except with entirely free software components. Naturally, they also needed to write replacements for KDE applications too, because they also relied on Qt.

      Of course years later Trolltech relicensed Qt under the LGPL so there was no longer any fear of Qt vanishing and KDE having to scramble to find a replacement. But by then, KDE and GNOME had taken different paths, KDE focusing on extreme configurability, GNOME focusing on user-friendliness. And then there were all those people who didn't like either desktop and decided to roll their own to fit their own needs better, and that's fine too.

  2. Fragmentation and Exploitation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The responses here are rather depressing. As a(n extremely humble) coder, to have a half dozen posts complaining of fragmentation is rather depressing. Somewhere there must be a non-trivial program which was written purely for the sake of doing so, but for the general case we may say that software is written neither accidentally nor arbitrarily, but to remedy a lack in existing software. It is in exceedingly bad taste to complain about any article offered gratis, but to say that the work involved was counterproductive is quite offensive. As a remark applied to a large and popular software project, as more than one of my fellow commentors have, it is a slur against the entire profession. The software is gratis even to ingrates, but -- as a programmer, you should consider the beam in thine eye. And if there is someone who instructs a computer but will not lay claim to being a programmer, well...perhaps silence is better than 'removing all doubt.'

    Touching more directly on the subject at hand, the question which most interested me was the one on exploitation. My opinion is that F/LOSS is indeed exploitative, especially if you aren't paid for working on it. Closed source may be just as exploitative, with the added sting that you may not be compensated commesurably with the commercial exploitation of your work. However, with the understanding that the fruits of your labors are often not directly monetizable, the value of the F/LOSS network may be presumed to be proportional to the number of participants, and reaping the benefits of this is limited only by your ability to consume them. That in itself may not generally be exchanged for a cup of coffee, but for many people it is worth an excellent salary, and ends up being a good value proposition. Discounting the ecosystem, "self-exploitative" isn't a bad description of contributing to F/LOSS projects, and many other walks of life besides. Taken on the whole though, it's abundantly clear that an open development model is highly beneficial to both its participants and users.