A study (PDF) funded by Microsoft and carried out by Harvard Business School professor Alan MacCormack aims to determine what kind of features and protections developers want in version 3 of the widely-used General Public License (GPL 3). The study, which uses extremely questionable methodology, concludes that open-source software developers don't want the GPL 3 to impose extensive patent licensing requirements or prevent agreements like the controversial cross-licensing deal between Novell and Microsoft.
MacCormack claims that the ongoing debate about what the GPL 3 should attempt to cover has primarily revolved around major companies and project leaders and that individual open-source software developers have been "significantly under-represented in the discussion." A brief glance at the methodology behind the study reveals beyond doubt that it is little more than propaganda bought and paid for by Microsoft. MacCormack describes the study as a survey of "key contributors" from major open-source projects. Although 332 emails were sent to various developers, only 34 agreed to participate in the survey—an 11 percent response rate. Of the 34 developers who responded, many of them are associated with projects like Apache and PostgreSQL that don't even use the GPL.
Although MacCormack thinks that "34 interviews were more than sufficient to conduct exploratory research to identify the predominant developer opinions on the most critical issues," I'm certainly not buying it. I also question MacCormack's claim that independent open-source software developers have been "under-represented" in the GPL 3 debate. Far more than 34 people have actively participated in the GPL 3 draft editing and review process.
For the draft editing and review process, the Free Software Foundation assembled four separate committees that consist of major open-source developers, contributors, and stakeholders associated with a large number of projects and companies. The FSF has also broadly encouraged members of the general public to comment and respond to various drafts. The draft process is highly transparent and inclusive to an extent that makes MacCormack's claims of under-representation seem difficult to accept given the small sample size of the study and the number of respondents who contribute to non-GPL projects.
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