As we’re looking to wind up the Open Source Software survey questionnaire later this week, I thought it might be helpful to give a sense of what’s in the form behind the link.
There’s nothing really magical in the questions — grouped roughly into sections to help understand your background, your experiences with OSS, what draws you to it or makes it more difficult for you, and then what you would like to see in the future of OSS.
The sort of thing that becomes apparent, when there is a collection of answers to this sort of questionnaire, is that getting an extensible codebase is a bigger draw for organizations than just getting cheap software.
And, in the realm of network engineering, at any rate, the biggest perceived need from OSS is a credible reference implementation of new network protocols.
Some of the outcomes will be pretty obvious: lack of current activity on an OSS project is a buzzkill for prospective users/contributors. Nonetheless, adding your answers to the mix will help capture nuances in peoples’ experiences, and add weight to the obvious and less obvious conclusions around things “we all just know”.
Come play: https://possie.techark.org/operators-and-open-source-software-survey/