Clearly I'm not the right person for this. :) Would someone else like to
take this survey?
Brian
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2002 18:53:30 -0300
From: Christian Reis <kiko@async.com.br>
To: Brian Behlendorf <brian@tigris.org>
Cc: Renata Pontin <renata@icmc.sc.usp.br>, Christian Reis <kiko@async.com.br>
Subject: Request for help in OSS/Free Software survey
Hello Brian,
I'm a developer from Brazil doing an MSc project on Open Source/Free
Software engineering processes, and as the final part of it, I'm
conducting a survey of the most important free software projects. I'm
sending out a request to the maintainer for each project, and so far we
have over 170 surveys filled out, including some very interesting
ones (Apache, Perl, Python, Sendmail, Berkeley DB, GNU Make, sed, to
name a few); http://www.async.com.br/~kiko/fsp/newproj.php lists all
registered projects.
Since you are maintainer for Subversion, which IMO is a *very* important
free software/open source project, I would be really grateful if you
could participate in the survey by answering for it, and for other
projects you lead (that you find are relevant to the study). The survey
is Web-based (I can send an email version of it to you, of course), and
it's online at:
http://www.async.com.br/~kiko/fsp/
IMHO the survey is quite unique, and the data and comments gathered form
a very interesting display of the different projects. The data will be
published and offered freely when the survey is finished, of course.
This is the only email I will send you with a request, and if you don't
have the time, kindly ignore it (use "d" in mail/mailx and "D" in
mutt/pine :-). Thanks if you do take the time, too.
I've pasted below some standard details about the survey.
--- Survey details start here ------------------------------------------
The Survey
http://www.async.com.br/~kiko/fsp/
It has 12 questions, and shouldn't take more than 15 minutes
to answer (we did some testing and most people finish in about 7).
If you would like someone else to answer, please send me an email
address and I'll ask them directly. If you would rather the survey
came in through email, let me know too and I'll send an email-ready
version.
The survey is usable on any browser (including text browsers like
lynx and w3m), and it contains *no* graphics, so it should be quite
fast. If you use Mozilla or another DOM-compliant browser the help
boxes show in the same page, which is a bit nicer than the default
behaviour. Apart from that it shouldn't be too much of a bother to
fill it out, and it will really help us get valid research findings.
If you want to know more about the survey, there is a FAQ on the
site, and I am available to answer any questions. A short text
follows describing it.
About the Research
The MSc project is an attempt to characterize open source/free
software projects with respect to their software processes. This
means how the project organizes, how code is designed, produced and
kept track of, and other issues relating to the project's approach
to development.
The qualification paper (in portuguese, i'm afraid) is available at
http://www.async.com.br/~kiko/quali/ - Google does a [rather poor,
and my surname isn't Kings] translation of it if you enter the URL
in the search box.
The results of this survey will be made publically available, and
the report will be also published in English, to make sure that the
largest number of people and organizations can benefit from the
data. If you are interested I can offer data in any format that's
considered convenient.
About me
I'm an MSc student at ICMC USP, Brazil, and my MSc work involves
describing and characterizing software process models for open
source projects. As part of my research, I've done a study of a
number of projects, and this year I've published an article on the
Mozilla Software Process at the OSS Workshop in Newcastle, UK. It's
available online at http://www.async.com.br/~kiko/papers.html
I'm also a member of the Kiwi, Bugzilla and PyGTK development teams,
and I work mainly on an open source project to develop a free point
of sales and retail management software, called Stoq.
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Received on Tue Oct 29 08:30:09 2002