Help in OSS/Free Software Survey for Textutils/Coreutils

[Christian Reis]

Hello Textutils maintainers,

I'm a developer from Brazil doing an MSc project on Open Source/Free
Software engineering processes, and as the final part of it, I'm
conducting a survey of the most important free software projects.  I'm
sending out a request to the maintainer for each project, and so far we
have over 270 surveys filled out, including some very interesting
ones (Apache, Perl, Python, Sendmail, Exim, Berkeley DB, GNU Make, Vim,
Nethack, Bugzilla, sed, MySQL, ntop, omniORB, Ogg, Konqueror, Nautilus,
iptables, Freeciv, SpamAssasin, CUPS, Galeon to name a famous few);
http://www.async.com.br/~kiko/fsp/newproj.php lists all registered
projects.

Since GNU Textutils (and now, Coreutils) is such an important project to
the general free software/open source community, it would be great if
you could participate and help us get some great data. The survey is
Web-based, and it's online at http://www.async.com.br/~kiko/fsp/ 

IMHO the survey is quite unique, and the data and comments gathered form
a very interesting display of the different projecs. The data will be
published and offered freely when the survey is finished, of course.

This is the only email I will send to this address with a request, and
if you don't have the time, kindly ignore it (use "d" in mail/mailx and
"D" in mutt/pine :-).  Thanks if you do take the time, too.
    
I've pasted below some standard details about the survey.

--- Survey details start here ------------------------------------------

The Survey

        http://www.async.com.br/~kiko/fsp/ 

    It has 12 questions, and shouldn't take more than 15 minutes
    to answer (we did some testing and most people finish in about 7).
    If you would like someone else to answer, please send me an email
    address and I'll ask them directly. If you would rather the survey
    came in through email, let me know too and I'll send an email-ready
    version.

    The survey is usable on any browser (including text browsers like
    lynx and w3m), and it contains *no* graphics, so it should be quite
    fast. If you use Mozilla or another DOM-compliant browser the help
    boxes show in the same page, which is a bit nicer than the default
    behaviour. Apart from that it shouldn't be too much of a bother to
    fill it out, and it will really help us get valid research findings.

    If you want to know more about the survey, there is a FAQ on the
    site, and I am available to answer any questions. A short text
    follows describing it.

About the Research

    The MSc project is an attempt to characterize open source/free
    software projects with respect to their software processes. This
    means how the project organizes, how code is designed, produced and
    kept track of, and other issues relating to the project's approach
    to development.

    The qualification paper (in portuguese, i'm afraid) is available at 
    http://www.async.com.br/~kiko/quali/ - Google does a [rather poor,
    and my surname isn't Kings] translation of it if you enter the URL
    in the search box.

    The results of this survey will be made publically available, and
    the report will be also published in English, to make sure that the
    largest number of people and organizations can benefit from the
    data. If you are interested I can offer data in any format that's
    considered convenient.

About me

    I'm an MSc student at ICMC USP, Brazil, and my MSc work involves
    describing and characterizing software process models for open
    source projects. As part of my research, I've done a study of a
    number of projects, and this year I've published an article on the
    Mozilla Software Process at the OSS Workshop in Newcastle, UK. It's
    available online at http://www.async.com.br/~kiko/papers.html

    I'm also a member of the Kiwi, Bugzilla and PyGTK development teams,
    and I work mainly on an open source project to develop a free point
    of sales and retail management software, called Stoq.

Take care,
--
Christian Reis, Senior Engineer, Async Open Source, Brazil.
http://async.com.br/~kiko/ | [+55 16] 261 2331 | NMFL
Take care,
--
Christian Reis, Senior Engineer, Async Open Source, Brazil.
http://async.com.br/~kiko/ | [+55 16] 261 2331 | NMFL