Cold calls and LinuxExpo

Normally I, like most people, ignore cold calls but someone asking about opinions on software caught my interest - doesn't happen often. Turned out to be a study using contact data gleaned from a now dead Linux magazine which, in turn, had been gleaned from the attendance information submitted to a now all-but dead conference: LinuxExpo (the data itself was hidden in the data stream behind those fancy barcodes on the admission badges).

Simple questions about which languages I used, which development environments I used (questioner hadn't heard of either anjuta or geany but then as she also asked me to spell Debian that was probably to be expected) as well as questions about magazines and other sources of technical information. (She had heard of LinuxFormat and El Reg so that wasn't too bad.) More complex questions about why I chose a particular tool which I couldn't really answer in just a few words seeing as Martin has done an entire thesis on the answers to that question!

Got a more interesting response when asked for my opinion on various vendors - 1 to 5 where 1 is rubbish and 5 is superb. Adobe: 1 - got an oooh, why's that? (umm, no source code and better free software alternatives). RedHat: 4 got a slightly surprised tone but Microsoft: 1 got a "Really? why?" - to which the only answer had to be "release all the source code".

Interesting that RedHat was mentioned, along with Google and Sun/Oracle but neither Ubuntu nor Debian.

Gradually found that the inspiration for the (expensive) methodology came from companies trying to get me to use proprietary demos which then turned into subscription-model tools. No go area for me, all my tools will need to remain free software or I'll just find something else. (Got another "why?" to that - with the inevitable "I need the source code to fix the tools" answer.) Also asked "what are your hobbies?" - to which I could only say "You've spent the last 5 minutes asking about my hobby, my paid work is not in IT".

Despite the call ending not 5 minutes ago, I've no memory of who was doing the survey. Still, she seemed impressed that I've been subscribed to LinuxFormat since about issue 3.