Re: back to the survey topic

[Dave Neary <dneary gnome org>]

Hi,

Nelson Marques wrote:
> I'm a openSuSE user (I know GNOME is sponsored mainly by Red Hat, but I
> don't like Fedora).

I know that someone has already pointed this out, but Novell, Red Hat,
and Canonical are all GNOME supporters - as are Nokia, Sun Microsystems,
 Intel, Sugar Labs, the FSF and Debian, all distributors of GNOME-based
distributions. Oh - and IBM, Google, Motorola, Mozilla, Igalia, OLPC,
SFLC (which currently don't make GNOME based distributions, to my
knowledge).

If you're talking about who pays the most developers of GNOME, we should
know this soon - I am currently running a survey of the GNOME developer
community and hope to answer exactly this question - stay tuned for more
details around the start of May.

> I've runned across a survery from SuSE which uses a
> commercial survey service, surveymonkey.
> 
> http://www.surveymonkey.com
> http://surveymonkey.com/s/6MJYV7T (openSuSE Survey)

Behdad has been using a different service for foundation surveys,
LimeSurvey - we have an instance installed on gnome.org already:
http://www.limesurvey.org/

We have actually done quite a few surveys in the past year or so - DVCS,
GUADEC/Akademy feedback, Friends of GNOME donors...

> I would recon the would be skepticism about this and the
> proprietary would jump into play again, so, not being a developer myself
> and being a marketing personality, I would point the following: don't
> all opensource system run on top of proprietary microcode (EFI, Legacy
> BIOS, etc)? Just a thought.

Certainly all systems have some drivers in them, but surely we can agree
that we should use free software everywhere we can? And running surveys
is a place where we can. And in general, in areas where the only
software available is proprietary, isn't worth asking the question: can
we fill this role with software we build ourselves?

For statistical free software, we are spoiled for choice - R has been
around for decades, Scilab has some advanced statistical functions too.
But in general, on scientific surveys, OpenOffice Calc or Gnumeric are
more than enough for the type of analysis we need to do.


-- 
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
dneary gnome org