Research survey: Impact of Microsoft Acquisition of GitHub
Dear contributors,
I am Natnaree Asavaseri and currently undertaking a research internship at Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan. As a part of my research, I am analyzing the impact of Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub.
I would like to conduct a survey to understand how developers perceive the Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub, especially from contributors to Linux distributions and BSD families. So please consider voicing your opinion by allowing us up to 5 minutes to complete our short survey.
https://goo.gl/forms/lbIL5qsinDRQyTaK2
We would like to remind you that participation in this survey is completely voluntary and your identity is hidden for anonymity. Thank you in advance for your assistance.
Natnaree
Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan
https://goo.gl/forms/...
We would like to remind you that participation in this survey is completely voluntary and your identity is hidden for anonymity.
Except for Google and those having enough power over it (large governments). Here is what you want to install on your own server: http://limesurvey.org
Another solution?
You will create a bias by using Google’s proprietary service as that will alienate many programmers who take the free software seriously (tracks users, makes proprietary software, forced upgrades, etc.). Google is a big enemy of the values we care about, and most of their pages will not even load properly without enabling its proprietary JavaScript.
The results of this survey were just posted to the heads mailing list.
https://naist-se.github.io/study-of-microsofts-github-acquisition/
The survey isn't up anymore, but back when the survey was first posted to the list a list user reported that the questions were all pro-Microsoft and pro-Github. The study lists as its hypotheses:
- Developers are afraid of changes
- Developers have personal preferences
- Developers prefer the features of GitHub
- Developers are more interested in technical aspects
none of which reveal much interest in freedom.
The results are also surely skewed by the fact that anyone unwilling to use proprietary software could not take the survey. The site acknowledges that some consider Google Forms to be a privacy issue, but while Google Forms is referred to as "free" (as in gratis), no mention is made of the freedom issues with the form:
"We choose Google forms as survey platform because it is all free and easy to contribute. However, we found later that many people don’t like Google form because of privacy concerns."
The acknowledgments page thanks "projects that let us register to your member and publish this survey" and lists Trisquel along with a link to this thread. In case anyone reaches this thread via that link, I want to point out that since even taking the survey would go against our community's values, the survey is unlikely to be representative our community's views, and that in recommending that we execute the proprietary software needed to complete the survey the OP violated one of our community guidelines.
Dear contributors,
I am happy to announce that we are ready to release preliminary results of the "Developer Perception to Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub" survey. These results can be accessed at "https://naist-se.github.io/study-of-microsofts-github-acquisition/". Again thank you for your participation and please feel free to share or discuss these results.
Natnaree
NAIST, Japan