On 14 Aug 2002 20:54:42 +1200, Damon Lynch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Wed, 2002-08-14 at 19:56, Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote: > You seem to be assuming that the only way to contribute to a distribution > is to pay money to its makers. > > > > 1)Have you ever contributed financially to a Linux distribution? > > 1.4.No, I contribute code instead > > 1.5.No, but I do a lot of testing of beta releases > > Hi Sridhar, > > Did you read question 1? I think the above covers what you are > suggesting rather well but if you can think of better wording then > please feel free to articulate it and I'll certainly consider it.
Oops, I missed that! However, I still feel that this poll is heavily weighted towards those who pay rather than contribute in kind. You need to ask yourself, "what is the aim of this poll, and what am I trying to measure"? If you are simply measuring pure financial support (i.e. "a survey on NZ Linux users to survey financial support for Linux distros", to use your own words), then your poll is mostly fine. It seems increasingly common for people to equate 'support' with 'financial support' [I'm not accusing you here, so relax :) ]. It should be remembered that free software development is primarily made up of ordinary people like you and me, who voluntarily devote their time towards the community. That may be done in a variety of ways, whether it be by coding, testing, writing documentation or articles, helping others or even simply evangelising. As you can probably see, Question 1 doesn't cover all these possibilities, and I don't think it can cover everything if you choose to list each option individually (the possibilities are effectively limitless). In place of 1.4 and 1.5 you need a more generic statement like "No, but I volunteer my time and labour instead". I don't think 1.6 is very appropriate. _All_ distributions need some kind of funding. Debian, for example, lives mostly off donations. Gentoo isn't very different, either. I think 2.1 can be expanded to something like "Purchasing goods". One look at MandrakeStore (http://www.mandrakestore.com/), for example, will show you that there are more things which can be purchased than just a boxed set. I think that questions 5, 6 and 9 should be simplified to simple yes/no/don't know options. As it stands, it appears that those questions are loaded (whether it be intentionally or unintentionally), thereby encouraging the respondent to answer in a 'pro-Linux' fashion. As a former market researcher, I used to deal with polls like this all the time. I believe that questions should generally be kept as simple as possible, else you risk leading or confusing the respondent. -- Sridhar Dhanapalan "Recently I bought Office XP. It was quite unpleasant feeling giving so much money for so buggy product. ... Solution: Uninstall Office XP and Windows." -- Georgi Guninski, security expert, http://www.guninski.com, 2001-07-12
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