FLOSS-JP :
Free/Libre/Open Source Software Japanese Developers Online Survey

Announce (Japanese) | Response to the questionnaire | Raw data

FLOSS-JP survey was 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.

[10th Feb. 2004]
[19th Nov. 2003] The Response to the questionnaire and Raw data are available. We are currently analyzing survey data. The final report will be also published in the future.

Background

Our objective is to identify the current status of Open Source / Free Software developers. The results of our survey is to be utilized for governmental policy making in the field of human resource development or technological promotion.

This survey is the Asian version of the FLOSS (Europe) (*1) and the FLOSS-US (*2) 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.

*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

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-ASIA survey will be conducted from November to December, 2003.

Survey method

The FLOSS-JP survey was conducted by using our online questionnaire system. Developers directly answered the questions at our web page. Respondents registered thier e-mail addresses at first, and they got their own questionnaire URLs by e-mail to prevent unintentional duplicated answers. The survey period was two months from 2nd September to 30th Octorber, 2003.

We also conducted paper-based questionnaires at open source related events shown below.

Linux Kernel Conference 2003 (2003/10/10)
Shibuya Perl Mongers Technical Talk#4 (2003/10/18)
Linux Conference 2003 / Kansai Open Source + Freeware 2003 (2003/10/30-11/1)

We did several announcements at developer's mailing lists and a news site for getting our survey known to developers.

This site	Announcement here (2003/9/2 -- 11/1)
News site	japan.linux.com (2003/9/2)
Banner Advertisement	SourceForge.jp, japan.linux.com, Slashdot.jp (2003/10/20 -- 10/30)
Mailing Lists	SourceForge.jp (2003/9/3, 10/22), Debian-devel (2003/9/5), Japan Linux Association (2003/9/5), ruby-dev (2003/9/18), FreeBSD announce-jp (2003/10/8)

Questions

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

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

Motivation: monetary / non-monetary, reputation, pleasure, creativity, jobs
Expectations: what do you expect of others? What do they expect of you?
Organization: efficiency, quality, comparison with commercial software
Law: intellectual property licenses, authorship, public domain
Technology: preferred programming tools

Furthermore, we added several questions in consideration of Japanese 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.

Results

We had 547 responses from Open Source/Free Software developers. We really appreciate their kind cooperation.

The result of the survey can be viewed as an executive summary and a full report. The Response to the questionnaire and Raw data are available.

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