Re: Emacs User Survey 2020 Results

[Adrien Brochard]

> > If this person chose to use Matlab, it’s totally their decision.
> > Software they used on their own device.  Nobody gets to say anything
> > about that.
>
> When Emacs Survey is promoted here, I will tell that there is Octave
> as free software as that is what people should know. Using proprietary
> software and promoting it to others is detrimental for safety of
> people and in itself unjust. I will always say something about
> that.

Let's just chill about Matlab please. There was no Matlab involved here.
I'm 100% against Matlab.


> > Now, the choice of Google forms is not great, but nobody forced anybody
> > to fill in the survey, and nobody has the right or authority to decide
> > with which software people get to use the name of Emacs with. That sort
> > of language policing is easily fascistic, whatever the yardstick looks
> > like.  Also, looking over your email again, I see no link to any online
> > survey tools that could replace the use of Google Forms here.

Also no Google forms involved. I used Jotform which is not free software
indeed, but much more compliant (HIPAA for example). But also correct
that nobody was forced and email answers were an option specifically for
that purpose.

> I have already pointed out to Adrien before the survey how that can be
> done. I would be happy to write the HTML with the form and I have my
> own system to write it. The survey is very simple to implement in
> simple HTML which can look nice with some stylesheet. And there are
> few free survey options. Adrien could ask for that and would get an
> answer on Emacs devel mailing list when he presented it first time.
>
> Yet, there would be no need for complex software, as simple HTML and
> simple one program in background on the server could collect
> information without problem. Times change and people are new and do
> not know that problem have been solved before decades since form.cgi

https://emacssurvey.org/faq.html#js

> German quality LimeSurvey is free software:
> https://demo.limesurvey.org/index.php?r=admin/authentication/sa/login

I did look at them. Their hosted version is prohibitively expensive for
the volume we had. And I am not willing to self-host.

Best,
Adrien Brochard