One of the questions that comes up often at BSD booths and on IRC is "but noone pays anyone to work on FreeBSD". There's a common misperception amongst non-committers that since FreeBSD itself isn't a company or an entity that all of its commits come from volunteers whose day jobs are totally unrelated to FreeBSD or that people stop committing once they get a "real" job. While I know that this is not necessarily true, it would be nice to have some hard facts I could refer people to. I'm also curious myself as to how many committers there are, if their day job is related to FreeBSD, and which companies do pay their employees to work on FreeBSD.
Is it possible for the powers that be to make a survey available to those with commit bits? Should the survey be targetted at those with commit bits in src or include ports committers as well? what about those with doc or www commit bits or should that be a separate survey showing that you don't have to be a developer to contribute to FreeBSD?
I've taken a stab at some survey questions for the marketing team to consider and fine-tune. If the survey goes forward I can help tabulate the results and write an article/whitepaper/report.
Cheers,
Dru
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1. How long have you had a FreeBSD commit bit?
2. Which portion of the FreeBSD cvs repository do you have commit access to?
3. Are you currently employed and if so, by whom?
4. Is your current employer aware of your FreeBSD commit bit?
5. Has your current employer ever paid you to work on source (best word?) that was committed to the FreeBSD cvs repository?
6. Has any employer ever paid you to work on source that was committed to the FreeBSD cvs repository? If so, which employer?