MRI
FLOSS-ASIA

FLOSS-ASIA
Free/Libre/Open Source Software
Asian Developers Online Survey

http://oss.mri.co.jp/floss-asia/

(supported by Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), Japan)

Announcements in Asian local communities


Translation of this announcement:
[English] [Chinese(Simpified)] [Chinese(Traditional)] [Korean] [Thai] [Japanese]

FLOSS-ASIA survey is being conducted by Mitsubishi Research Institute,Inc. (MRI), Japan. It is a part of the project on the "Survey on Human Resource Development for Open Source Software Developers", supported by Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), Japan.

This survey is the Asian version of the FLOSS (Europe) (*1), the FLOSS-US (*2), the FLOSS-JP (*3) survey. The FLOSS survey was conducted in 2002 by International Institute of Infonomics University of Maastricht, The Netherlands supported by European Commission IST programme. The FLOSS-US survey was conducted in 2003 by Stanford University's Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) supported by the National Science Foundation.

The Asian developers were very few in these two surveys bacause their questionnaires were only in English. So, we planed the FLOSS-JP survey in Japanese and FLOSS-ASIA survey in Asian languages. The FLOSS-JP survey has been conducted until the end of Octorber, 2003.

*1 FLOSS Survey : Free/Libre and Open Source Software: Survey and Study
*2 FLOSS-US Survey : The Free/Libre/Open Source Software Survey for 2003
*3 FLOSS-JP Survey : Free/Open Source Software Japanese Developers Survey

The FLOSS-ASIA is almost identical as the FLOSS-JP survey, most of which is derived from the FLOSS (Europe) survey for comparing results worldwidely. We are cooperating with Rishab Aiyer Ghosh who led the FLOSS survey, and Ruediger Glott of MERIT, The Netherlands.

For comparability with the previous surveys, FLOSS-ASIA asks questions on the same range of topics that the original FLOSS survey addressed, including:

Furthermore, we added several questions in consideration of Asian developers characteristics such as English skills for online communication, base community whether domestic or global, Linux qualification, how to learn OS/FS development, and income from OS/FS development.

The FLOSS-ASIA survey period is from 1st December 2003 to 30th January, 2004. We will make public tabulated responses for each of the questions at our website as soon as the survey period is closed.

We are committed to protecting respondents' privacy: no personal identifiers will be stored with your answers (except your submitted IP address only used for eliminating duplicated responses), and responses will be reported in aggregates that will prevent inferences about individual identities.

In our survey, the targeted Open Source/Free Software developer contains:

If you are other than programmers, some questions may be hard to answer. Please read them as your own activities like development as writing for writers or programming as testing for testers. Please don't hasitate to answer.

If you have any questions, please contact floss-asia-admin@mri.co.jp.

Acknowlegement

The FLOSS-ASIA survey is conducted with kind cooperation of Asian Open Source communities. We appreciate their great effort, especially for asian language translation and announcement in local community:

We also appreciate the European FLOSS survey team for their consent to use the questions willingly and for sending additional questions about skills development.

[Correspondence]

Kazuo Hiyane and Jun Iio
Mitsubishi Research Institute, Inc.
Information Technology Research Dept.
2-3-6, Otemachi, Chiyoda, Tokyo 100-8141, Japan
Tel. +81-3-3277-0750 Fax. +81-3-3277-3473
E-mail: floss-asia-admin@mri.co.jp
Copyright(c) 2002-2003 Mitsubishi Research Institute, Inc.