Do open source software developers listen to their users?

Absolutely...not, well some do. I stopped using/contributing to Gaim/Pigdin a long time ago because of this. Ask for a simple feature and explain why it's helpful for you as to show meritorious reason for requesting said feature, only to be insulted, disrespected, or at the very least turned down without consideration.

I stopped reporting bugs to ubuntu as well. Because real bugs were turned into questions or closed, or ignored.

So I took up programming and will never use it again. there are plenty others out there. I always thought open source software was a great idea. It's starting to seem like capitalism in disguise.

Judging from what people are saying here, I guess we're lucky. The open source code we're using to publish our iPad magazine is run by AWESOME people who have a lot of passion for their work. They're clear about what the road-map is and let people know that when features are proposed that aren't in it. I can't say enough good things about them, check them out - https://github.com/simbul/baker

TL;DR - no. And that's before considering the validity of their data collection method.

The general OSS project tend to start when someone has an itch to scratch. They build something which solves that problem and upload the source somewhere. The next step is determined by 2 questions:

1) Does the developer keep having the same itch? 2) Does the developer get support from a company or someone else who has the same itch?

If not, the code becomes part of the Sourceforge wasteland of unmaintained, unused code.

Github is an interesting attempt to keep the itch-scratching alive by making forking easy, but when there are 10 different forks for similar functionality, all by people of unknown coding ability, rewriting or reforking becomes the safest option.

It's a shame they didn't include window managers/windowing environments. I'd be very interested in the responses they'd have gotten.