If you are a developer can you help us by taking this survey. We are attempting to get some metrics around open source adoption in commercial products.
Survey Link: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/PT56NHC
Thanks!
Here, I'll do it for you: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/PT56NHC
... and now that I've gone to take the survey, I can't finish it because there is no suitable answer for question 6. Another of the questions I had trouble understanding the distinction between "None" and "0" as answers.
So I gave up.
Good surveys are really quite hard to design, and bad surveys are pretty near useless. It's pretty clear you're asking how much people will pay for something you're thinking of producing, so I suggest you think a lot harder about how you're going to get that information. I'll be very surprised if this survey gives you anything reliable.
You have to rely on someone posting a reply with a clickable link (most Show HN:'s have this format).
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To the OP, I took the survey. All the best.
1. submit the URL itself with a brief description, then post a comment giving further information; or,
2. having submitted your "Ask HN" as you have, then post a comment with a clickable link.
Option 1 also doesn't carry the ranking penalty of a URL-less submission.
We do pay for tools we find useful.
If a product could solve that problem (classifying updates and performing code analysis to determine if something could break) it would definitely be worth paying for.
Note also that you're asking the wrong people, and it's going to be hard to ask the right people with an Internet post. The best candidates for this tool are busy founders/CTOs/sysadmins/engineers who don't have time to manage their updates, much less take surveys on Hacker News.
It's just too vague and it implies that I'm lazy/behind. Let's say I'm using jQuery 1.x, for example, because when I was building/testing last, that was the most stable version. Today jQuery has probably 20 more "updates" since I rolled mine into production - the version number has incremented 20 times - but it doesn't mean I'm "out of date", does it? I don't believe that I have to update my use everytime jQuery goes from 1.34 to 1.35 to 1.36 all the way to 1.99.
So "out of date" is a bit problematic for me in that I don't feel the need to test/use every incremental update.
It should also include the option "I don't know, depends on how useful it is".
I just chose a random answer since that option wasn't there (and the question was required).
i work for a small consultancy that builds bespoke solutions using open source code - we have loads of projects, some ancient (cvs!), and i am sure no-one has a clue what versions of what we used when (sure, it's documented for the client, but we don't have our own central list). now perhaps we should be better organised, but i suspect many other companies are in a similar position.
but if we were going to pay for this, how would it help us make money? is the idea that we can approach ex-clients and scare them with lists of security holes? or are they the target clients - perhaps they should be running this code to audit their systems? and that sounds so useful i am surprised that nothing like this already exists...?