Understanding Free Software Developers: Findings from the FLOSS Study

Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, MERIT/Institute of Infonomics, University of Maastricht

11/12/2008
(Original Publish Date: 1/10/2003)

This chapter presents an overview of findings from the Survey of Developers from the FLOSS project, involving over 2700 respondents among free/open source software developers worldwide. The survey studied several factors influencing developers’ participation within the free/open source community, including their perceptions of differences within the community and with the commercial software world, personal, ethical, political and economic motives for participation, and their degree of interaction within and contribution to the free/open source software community. These results are linked to preliminary findings from a study of developer contribution to the Linux kernel based on an analysis of the source code.