To (most) people in IT, terms like open source and free software bring up a lot of associations. (For some those association differ wildly between these two terms.) Does the same go for the general audience of the products which these concepts can apply to? (Software, hardware, industrial machines, ...) And if so, what are those associations?What I'm looking for is research that has been conducted to find out what commonly used terms to describe free or open products mean to end users, if anything at all.
Has there been research about how aware the general public is of open source?
marketing;statistics