We appreciate your interest. You should be receiving more information about the program shortly. Now, can we ask you for a few more minutes of your time?
The following survey is optional -- feel free to fill in as much or as little as you care to -- but it will be a great help to us in our efforts to better understand our user community. We'll share what we find out in a future meta beta email!
Some people have philosophical and financial reasons for favoring open source software. Others set a high priority on the level of support, features and "polish" that can sometimes accompany commercial software. Many are in between. Where are you?
As we all know, software design involves tradeoffs. Please help us to focus our efforts by assigning values for each of these categories. Please try to distribute the values so that for example no more than two or three priorities are "Critical".
And, if we've missed one of your priorites please list and rank them below!
Please choose all tools that you currently use or anticipate using within the next year.
Reflecting on your purchases over the last few years, and your plans for the coming year approximately how much money does your organization spend per person on specialized software like the above per year ? Please exclude generic software such as productivity applications. Select an amount that falls between the intervals.
Based on the functionality you get form your current tools, do you think that the money you spend on them is..
All other things being equal, if a tool were to be announced that had the same general functionality as one of your primary tools above, but cost significantly less or performed significantly better than that tool would you be inclined to:
Compared to previous years, how do you expect that your budget for software will in this year and the next few years will be..
If you discovered a new modeling application that you "just had to have" would you..
Considering your own experience and that of people you work with, how much would you feel good about paying for the "near perfect" ABM tool, assuming that it would replace the functionality of some other commercial and/or open source tools? That is, one that functioned almost exactly how you would like it to, had all of the features that you needed and had a number of special features that you couldn't find anywhere else?
For this question, please think in general terms, not about your experience or expectations of Metascape tools or of any other existing or planned tools. Instead, imagine a tool that doesn't exist (yet) -- the "perfect" tool for your work. It would support all of the features of the tools above that you need, excluding very general mathematics, statistics and GIS functionality. It would do almost everything better than existing tools, and it would do some things that no other tools could do. How much would you feel good about paying for a single-user license for such a tool, assuming that it would replace the functionality of some other commercial and/or open source tools?
When you purchase software, how much do each of the following qualities play into how you value that software? In other words, if the software were exactly the same as either an Open Source or a competing product except for in this one aspect, how would that impact the value that you placed on the software?
Any other comments you'd like to share?
