[survey] Developers' motivation

[ArjendeLangen]

Hello,

I'm a student at the University of Amsterdam and I'm currently performing research for my master thesis on Open Source developers' motivation. I need primary data on the subject and I would like to ask any of you who develop or have developed Open Source software to fill in a survey.

It's a relatively short survey with less than 12 multiple choice questions and two lists of statements. Your ~10 mins of time to fill in the survey is greatly appreciated by me!

I will post the results of the research here if anybody is interested!

Link to the survey: http://bit.ly/surveymotivation

Kind regards,
Arjen

[J65nko]

AFAIK not many developers frequent this forum. For response of OpenBSD devs you could post on the OpenBSD misc mailing list.

For FreeBSD developers the freebsd-hackers mailing list.

[ArjendeLangen]

Bedankt voor de tip!

I'm a bit hesitant to send to mailing lists, would you think it would be appreciated by the subscribers? Should I be OK if I stick to misc lists?

[J65nko]

I have seen requests like yours on those lists before. Most developers have no time to click through forum messages, and rather prefer mailing lists. IMHO if you want responses, a mailing list is the only way to go

You are doing a short and polite request, with a scientific purpose. Instead of posting the complete survey in the message, you refer to the actual survey in a link, which is a positive point. I don't think people mind.

[DutchDaemon]

Agree. As long as you don't post messages along the lines of "Please finish my thesis for me!" (like the "I need this for my homework tomorrow" type questions) and explain how this thesis might actually help them in the long run, no one will mind.

[kusuriya]

Yep, Totally agree with DutchDaemon. Developers are much like cats and they tend to be a little particular, and very hard to hurd. soo just approch it with some tact and a little bit of you scratch my back, I will get yours attitude and you should get far.