Re: Survey on FLOSS

[MJ Ray <mjr@dsl.pipex.com>]

This email contains questions for FLOSS and FSFE people, and
suggests DDs wait until the buggy survey form is fixed, to
avoid wasting time.

The DPL announced to us:
> http://flosspols.org/survey/survey_part.php?groupid=mmd

It's good to see people gathering data about us. I thank
the survey organisers for that and the DPL for passing on
the announcement. Let nothing I say below negate that.

As a statistician, I am worried that this is yet another
under-tested survey form about this important topic being
released into the world without a good pilot study first. Where
is the pilot study report? I can't figure it out from the project
status page, it's not on the "dissemination" page and there's no
"downloads" page.

Some of the questions (18 for example) seem to assume
a particular bias in the respondant. In others (12 and 38),
some of the range of possible answers are not covered. The
"discrimination" page is one-sided and not justified.

Finally, I'm worried that there are technical problems
meaning that my time filling out the form was wasted. As
well as John's emails that I've just seen, my final answer
screen said "You took 0 min 41 sec to fill out this survey"
which is not true at all. Is this survey even working? I
suggest that DDs wait until we have confirmation.

I am disappointed by the University of Maastricht (I didn't
expect much, as they are part of the consortium with "Mr LZW"
Unisys running the EU Open Source Observatory, which is oddly
quiet about swpat). I'm really surprised that the University
of Cambridge Department of Social Anthropology have put their
name to this survey. Who is the responsible person there?

Who at the EU was responsible for granting further funding to
this group? Are FSF Europe advising this group, as they planned
to offer? Their FP6 page was last updated 2004-04, so I'll email.

Copies sent to FLOSS survey contact address and FSFE FP6 list.
Please cc me on any list-only replies.

-- 
Thanks and best wishes,

MJR/slef
http://people.debian.org/~mjr/