From: Gregorio Robles <grex@scouts-es.org> To: lwn@lwn.net Subject: (News) Research on Open Source/Free Software Developers at TU-Berlin Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2001 16:14:51 +0200 Research: Who are Open Source Developers? There is plenty of literature dealing with the process of developing Open Source and its economical significance. And there are also piles of text about the tools that are used in or for Open Source... but, what do we know about all those committed developers? About where they come from, what project they work for, what they know...? To cut it short, among all speculations there is little to no empirical data. That's why a research group at the Technical University of Berlin has started Widi (Who Is Doing It?), a questionaire aimed at the strong community of Open Source and Free Software developers to tell something about their social, cultural and professional environment. This data will complete automatic examination of gigs of source code by means of freely available tools the research group is refining. The questionaire can be found in several languages on http://widi.berlios.de. The requested data is recorded anonymously, no entry is mandatory. Interesting up-to-date statistics, portraying the actual distribution on each item, can be accessed at any time. Anybody who has some time been involved in Open Source/free software development is kindly asked to donate five minutes of her precious time for filling it out. More than 5000 developers already have. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * thanx for your time, Grex - Gregorio Robles grex@cs.tu-berlin.de