The ongoing MIT/Munich Survey we reported on two weeks ago — about the development of embedded Linux — is off to a good start, but needs more respondents to achieve the best data quality. Meanwhile, survey author and administrator Joachim Henkel has sent us some interesting — and in some cases, surprising, he says –… result tidbits.

• Most replies so far (46 percent) have come from developers working for hardware manufacturers. Software firms account for 28 percent, and universities and hobby developers 26 percent.
• Are the participants Open Source enthusiasts? Well — there is a wide variation: some don't work at all on Open Source Software (OSS) in their spare time, some 20 hours per week or more. Most agree or strongly agree to the statement that “Linux is good code” — but obviously, this does not require OSS enthusiasm. Other items indicate that, yes, the majority of participants do have sympathies for OSS ideas.
• An even greater variation can be found with respect to the amount of new code for embedded Linux that is made public. The distribution of responses is strongly dichotomous: firms tend to make either very little (less than 10 percent) or very much (90 percent or more) of their code public.
• Most participants — 93 percent — agree that OSS allows small firms to afford innovation. And indeed — one third of respondents work for firms with 10 people or less. But there are also big players in the sample, about 33 percent with 200 people or more.

Henkel says the survey needs more responses in order to make the results significant, and he invites you to participate.

The 10-minute survey can be found here

 
This article was originally published on LinuxDevices.com and has been donated to the open source community by QuinStreet Inc. Please visit LinuxToday.com for up-to-date news and articles about Linux and open source.