This is an overview of the survey topics we're planning to explore with the 2016 Open Source Survey. Please see contributing to this survey for the ways in which you can help us improve this survey.
Two strong values within the open source community are commitment to transparency as well as privacy and security of information. There is an inherent tension in these two values, as full commitment to either one limits the extent to which the other can be achieved. Let's explore the boundaries of this tension and establish what values the community holds and how they're ordered (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Values_Survey related here).
Software development is an unusual trade in that autodidacticism is common and people often learn from working with or observing others who are not geographically proximate and will likely never meet face to face. Nonetheless, previous research has demonstrated that 1:1 help and mentorship are critical to building skills, confidence, and professional networks. How do beginners seek and select mentorship within the open source community? What motivates some individuals to make casual (one-off) contributions to new projects rather than finding a mentor and diving deep into a project and a community? How do people willing to mentor make that known, and how do they select mentees?
Online harassment is widespread problem that has discouraged participation in online spaces, such as those where open source development takes place, by women and other underrepresented groups. While there have been high-profile cases that generated substantial coverage in the press, and our support team is aware of cases that are escalated to GitHub, there has been no representative study of the prevalence, dynamics, and consequences of online harassment.
Previous studies of open source communities have focused on maintainers and contributors, to the near exclusion of those who are solely consumers of open source projects. We know from analyses of traffic on ours site that the passive consumers of content on any public repository vastly outnumber the active contributors. Who are the consumers? What do they use these projects for? Why do they select open source projects instead of commercial products? To what extent are they engaged with, or even aware of, the philosophy and values of free and open source software?
How do open source project maintainers select licenses? What considerations go into the selection of an open source license? Is the license (or lack of) of a project a significant factor when choosing whether or not to contribute to a project?
How representative is open source of the software developer community? Of the world population? How do these characteristics correlate with experiences, motivations, and other aspects of participation in open source?
Much open source development is subsidized by companies, who either employ engineers to work on open source projects, or allow them to work on those projects when they also provide value to the firm. We’d like to explore how supported developers feel by their employers to contribute to open source i.e. are there IP agreements covering their open source contributions? If so, what do they look like?
In addition, we’d like to explore what the decision making process look like for companies adopting open source/incorporating an open source dependency in their technology stack.