The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), in cooperation with the Open Source
Development Network (OSDN) recently presented preliminary results from an
interesting study on open-source software developers ("hackers").
The preliminary results of the BCG/OSDN survey reveal that:
o Participants note extremely high levels of creativity in their projects.
o Having fun, enhancing skills, access to source code, and user needs
drive contributions to the Open Source community. Defeating proprietary
software companies is not a major motivator.
o The Open Source community is truly global in composition, with
respondents coming from 35 countries.
o Most participants dedicated at least 10 hours per week in their shared
programming efforts.
o Contrary to popular belief about hackers, the open source community is
mostly comprised of highly skilled IT professionals who have on average
over 10 years of programming experience.
For details (sites will be updated as further results develop) ...
http://www.bcg.com/opensource/
http://www.osdn.com/bcg/
Joel