SANTA CRUZ, USA: When it comes to leading edge or High Performance Computing, open source developers overwhelmingly say they would recommend using commercial versions of Linux over non-commercial versions, according to the latest Evans Data Corp Open Source Software and Linux survey. 

A similar number would also recommend commercial versions over non-commercial for mission-critical large enterprise development and data center development.  Non-commercial Linux is preferred for web development and embedded systems.

"While the open source nature of Linux and the availability of Linux source code appeal to developers doing complex leading edge and mission critical work," said John Andrews, president and CEO of Evans Data Corp, "they also like the additional support they get with commercial products.  And since improper configuration is the largest perceived security threat to a Linux system, configuration and management tools that come with commercial distros are important in these situations"

Other highlights from this in-depth survey or 400 developers active in open source development, conducted in August 2008, include:

Ubuntu was used by 24 percent of the open source developers and was the most used Linux distribution although the combination of Red Hat Linux (21 percent) and Red Hat Enterprise (19 percent) top Ubuntu use.

VMWare was the top virtual machine technology used by the open source developers, with just over a third reporting its use.

Apache/BSD style licensing or GPL2 are far the most used open source licensing models, with GPL3 and LGPL lagging far behind.