[openstack-dev] [all] developer survey on contribution policies

Allison Randal allison at lohutok.net
Sun Sep 28 19:07:21 UTC 2014


On 09/28/2014 11:30 AM, Tim Bell wrote:
> Can you give some more details on the survey with respect to 
> OpenStack ? I have both a developer contribution policy survey and a 
> project contribution policy survey.
> 
> It would also be good to have more background as to the interest in 
> obtaining the survey results and what you intend to do with them 
> since this is not clear from your post.

It's a topic I've been interested in for over a decade, as I've worked
on various different open source projects, in various different roles.
People sometimes talk about what "most projects do" or what "most
developers want", but I've never seen any data to back up those
statements. It can be difficult to have a genuine conversation around a
large unknown center.

The idea for this particular survey started in the last face-to-face
meeting of the OpenStack Foundation board, on the topic of CLAs. I
promised several people, but especially Josh McKenty, that I'd gather
more concrete statistics on developer opinions about contribution
policies, and on project usage patterns for CLAs and other contribution
agreements (how common they are, how they're applied, etc).

The survey isn't just for OpenStack developers, it's for all FLOSS
developers. I'll make a blog post noting general trends across the
entire FLOSS community. But, I'll also put together a very condensed
informational slide of the results for the OpenStack Foundation board
meeting in Paris.

Allison



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