Are open-source devotees the bearded, sandal-wearing geeks that legend says they are?
According to a new survey, open-source software developers are mostly men in their twenties, and they vastly favor the Debian operating system distribution. The “Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS)” report also found that although many might not make a living from their open-source activities, they spend a serious amount of time on them. The report on the state of the open-source industry, carried out by the International Institute of Infonomics at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands and Berlecon Research, forms one of the most detailed pictures yet of open-source developers, examining their motives and habits, and even their personal lives. It also looks at the way governments and businesses use open-source software. The name of the report refers to three different terms for open-source software, which broadly refers to software distributed under a license that allows developers to modify and redistribute the software’s original programming code, as long as the mod
