LawrenceHecht
commented
5 years ago @cben Here are some answers:
- The survey was conducted on July 8 – 29, 2019. Respondents were solicited via social media and with emails to The Linux Foundation, TODO Group, and The New Stack email lists. No type of company was targeted.
- The study is representative of companies that use open source software. Here is a table looking at the distribution by # of employees:
| Q. How many people work for your company or organization? 2019, n=2671; 2018, n=748. | 2019 |
|---|---|
| Self-employed or not working | 12.3% |
| 2-50 | 22.8% |
| 51-250 | 15.7% |
| 251-1,000 | 13.0% |
| 1,001-10,000 | 14.4% |
| More than 10,000 | 20.8% |
| Don't know | 1.1% |
- The data represents individual respondents. We couldn't enforce a one-response per company rule without eliminating privacy protections for respondents. None of the charts are weighted.
caniszczyk
Hi, coming here from reading https://thenewstack.io/research-shows-open-source-program-offices-improve-software-practices/. Obviously the survey sampled only a tiny fraction of all companies in the world. Please say something about how the survey was distributed / what kinds of companies was it targetted at?
Even if a reader trusts your conclusions "the findings are not the result of self-selection bias", i.e. that it's a representative sample, it's unclear a sample of what. For example there are probably no mom-and-pop-pizza shops here, or other completely offline businesses here... Which I agree is out-of-scope to ask about OSPO and such :wink:, just making the point there some implicit scope and knowing it would be useful to the reader.
A bar chart of verticals [and company sizes] could go a long way towards answering this. chart3 has number of answers by vertical:
But is that number of individual respondents, or number of companies?
BTW, are all the graphs weighted by number of respondents from same company / company size / normalized to 1 per company? "One hundred and thirty responses were excluded because they appeared to come from the same company" — so I guess 1 per company, all weighted equally?