[Savannah-hackers] Looking for Research Data

[Sylvain Beucler]

Savannah-hackers,

Dan is requesting some stats. Is it ok to find and publish these?


I also have some comments. Feel free to add yours:

We at Savannah are part of the Free Software movement, which is  
different from the Open Source movement in its goals and values. Please  
do not make the confusion.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html

I do not think we can measure the number of new releases per year in a  
free software/open source context: since the software is Free, often  
developers offer read access to the current version of their project,  
or make very frequent releases (it is one element of the 'bazaar'  
model). Releases with a new major version number denote project code  
rehandling more often than marketing events, unlike in proprietary  
software context.

Last, I am not sure patents are accurate in this issue; copyright may  
be. Moreover, software patents are not tolerated in a lot of countries,  
such as the ones that are part of Europe, which makes the argument  
inadequate there.

--
Sylvain


Dan Bayn wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm researching an article to test the notion that profit motive (as  
> provided by patent law) leads to higher rates of invention. I hope to  
> be able to compare the per capita rate of patent applications and/or  
> product releases between companies like Microsoft and Open Source  
> meccas like Savannah.
>
> Can you point me to a source for the following data?:
> - New Releases per year,
> - New Projects per year, and
> - Total Users per year.
>
> Any help you can provide will be greatly appreciated.
>
> Thanks, --Dan Bayn