questionary - who developes FS/OSS

[Jan-Oliver Wagner]

On Thu, Jul 12, 2001 at 12:06:06AM +0200, Alessandro Rubini wrote:
> > just to let you know: At Tech Uni Berlin, all _developers_
> > of Free Software / Open Source Software are invited to
> > answer a really short questionary.
> > 
> > 	http://widi.berlios.de/
> 
> Maybe I'm suspicious by nature, but why should we spend our time to
> send personal information to those people? Who are they?  What is
> their aim in this move?

basically these are people who received money from the German government.
It appears they now spend the money on this and that related
somehow to 'open source' (which is what they got the money for). 

Personally I don't know any of these people. By now I haven't seen
any serious contribution by GMD to the Free Software approach.
GMD aims at creating spin-offs with proprietary products.

> And independently of whether their are friends or foes, I doubt they
> will get a statistically meaningful data set given how little spread
> the infromation about the poll is. So why should we care?

I also think this will be *far* from representative. You can also
see it in the other berlios activities which have no representative
free software projects in their sourceforge application.
Furthermore they have a list of 'Linux-companies' with an
'importance  order' noone can really take seriously. Calling
themselve the 'Open Source mediator' they advertise proprietary
companies there.

The principle ideas of berlios are OK, but I just wonder why
I don't see any of those 'OS mediators' experts around taking
part in serious discussions about Free Software. I may be blind
or in the wrong lists though.

Jan
-- 
Jan-Oliver Wagner               http://intevation.de/~jan/

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