
Ask HN: 1 minute Survey About Open Source Software in Your Products - bretthardin
Hey Guys,<p>If you are a developer can you help us by taking this survey. We are attempting to get some metrics around open source adoption in commercial products.<p>Survey Link: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/PT56NHC<p>Thanks!
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ColinWright
If you really want people to do this, why do you make them copy and paste the
URL into their browser? Why don't you provide a clickable link?

Here, I'll do it for you: <http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/PT56NHC>

... and now that I've gone to take the survey, I can't finish it because there
is no suitable answer for question 6. Another of the questions I had trouble
understanding the distinction between "None" and "0" as answers.

So I gave up.

Good surveys are really quite hard to design, and bad surveys are pretty near
useless. It's pretty clear you're asking how much people will pay for
something you're thinking of producing, so I suggest you think a lot harder
about how you're going to get that information. I'll be very surprised if this
survey gives you anything reliable.

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WrkInProgress
I was under the impression that you can't have a clickable link in a post
submission (or maybe a specific type of submission).

You have to rely on someone posting a reply with a clickable link (most Show
HN:'s have this format).

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To the OP, I took the survey. All the best.

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bretthardin
Thanks for taking the survey.

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mtogo
It's good etiquette to post the results page with the poll so that it benefits
the entire community, not just yourself.

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bretthardin
Yup. That is the plan. Once we collect the data, I will post the results.

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kevinherron
I marked "I only use free tools", but what I really wanted was an option like
"This isn't worth paying for".

We do pay for tools we find useful.

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bobbywilson0
I thought the same, so I selected less than $10/month.

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huhtenberg
Consider making all questions optional and you'll get more people answering.

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BrandonM
A metacomment related to question 6: Ubuntu tells us exactly how many packages
need to be updated, and the update is as simple as executing a single command.
The problem is ensuring that functionality is not broken by things like API or
subtle behavior changes. This means that updates end up happening infrequently
since they need to be regression tested on a development server before being
pushed to production.

If a product could solve that problem (classifying updates and performing code
analysis to determine if something could break) it would definitely be worth
paying for.

Note also that you're asking the wrong people, and it's going to be hard to
ask the right people with an Internet post. The best candidates for this tool
are busy founders/CTOs/sysadmins/engineers who don't have time to manage their
updates, much less take surveys on Hacker News.

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ScottWhigham
I bailed at question #5: "How many open source packages that you build your
product on are currently out of date?"

It's just too vague and it implies that I'm lazy/behind. Let's say I'm using
jQuery 1.x, for example, because when I was building/testing last, that was
the most stable version. Today jQuery has probably 20 more "updates" since I
rolled mine into production - the version number has incremented 20 times -
but it doesn't mean I'm "out of date", does it? I don't believe that I have to
update my use everytime jQuery goes from 1.34 to 1.35 to 1.36 all the way to
1.99.

So "out of date" is a bit problematic for me in that I don't feel the need to
test/use every incremental update.

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bitops
I agree that Question #6, the keystone, is poorly designed.

It should also include the option "I don't know, depends on how useful it is".

I just chose a random answer since that option wasn't there (and the question
was required).

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bretthardin
That is a good point. Thanks. I wil implement that answer in future surveys.

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andrewcooke
i clicked on the "only free tools", but this is an interesting idea. how are
you planning to implement it? a tool that scans our git, hg, svn and cvs repos
and tells us what we have would be quite interesting (although there's the
obvious hurdle of trusting third party code enough to ever run it).

i work for a small consultancy that builds bespoke solutions using open source
code - we have loads of projects, some ancient (cvs!), and i am sure no-one
has a clue what versions of what we used when (sure, it's documented for the
client, but we don't have our own central list). now perhaps we should be
better organised, but i suspect many other companies are in a similar
position.

but if we were going to pay for this, how would it help us make money? is the
idea that we can approach ex-clients and scare them with lists of security
holes? or are they the target clients - perhaps they should be running this
code to audit their systems? and that sounds so useful i am surprised that
nothing like this already exists...?

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JoshTriplett
Same objection to question 6 that other people have mentioned: I wouldn't pay
for a service that tells me about open source software updates (because I keep
up with them myself already as part of my usual process of staying informed),
but that doesn't mean I don't pay for services in general.

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rickette
Only 6 questions, I've seen much worse surveys ;-)

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bretthardin
Wanted to keep it short for the HN crowd. :)

