Like various Corporates have surveys and analyses,Boston Consulting in collab with OSDN has come with a Hacker Survey. It is available here: http://www.osdn.com/bcg/ ( Under GNU FDL)

The thing I observed was, the prominient reasons for people involving with Free Software/Open Source is " It is Intellectually Simulating and and it improves Skills".

Other noticeable points were:

- 98% are males ( :( if in college & :) if in school ) - India has a very small proportion as compared to US and Germany.

Feel Free to Comment.

-- Senthil