Developers take a shift from Windows to Linux

Developers take a shift from Windows to Linux

According to a recent survey by The Eclipse Foundation, Ubuntu is the most popular choice for developers

Monday, June 01, 2009

BANGALORE, INDIA: The Eclipse Foundation, a not-for-profit, member supported corporation that hosts the Eclipse projects, recently announced the Eclipse Community Survey 2009 in The Open Source Developer Report.

According to the report, Linux has become the most common deployment platform for the developer community. There is a shift from the Microsoft Windows to Linux and Mac OSX for their desktop development operating system.

26.9 per cent of respondents cite Linux as primary desktop operating system, representing a 7 percentage point increase from 2007. Though Windows is still the dominant development OS at 64 per cent, it has decreased 10 percentage points from 2007.

The most popular Linux variant of choice among developers is Ubuntu, which accounts for over half of Linux respondents. Mac OSX has increase to 6.9 per cent from 3.5 per cent in 2007, said the report.

Eclipse IDEs are the most popular primary development environments among respondents, it added; Eclipse JDT with 60 per cent , Eclipse PHP Development Tools with 12.6 per cent and C/C++ Developer Tools with 6.3 per cent.

Source code management (SCM), change management (CMS) and build management (BM) are important tools for most developers, added the report. The dominant Source Code Management (SCM) system used by 57.5 per cent developers is Subversion, followed by CVS which comes in at 20 per cent.

Ant was the most popular build management tool with the usage of 33.4 per cent, followed by Maven (18 per cent) and Hudson (9.1 per cent). More than 20 per cent claimed they did not use a build management tool.

MySQL and Oracle were the dominant databases on which total 55 per cent of applications are deployed.

The survey also said that more number of organizations today are moving towards the open source software model. 48.2 per cent of respondents reported the open source model for their company, compared to 37 per cent in 2007. 15.6 per cent state that their company has a business model reliant on open source today, versus only 10 per cent two years ago.

The survey was promoted to individuals who visited the eclipse.org home page during the period of April 14 to May 15, 2009. In total 1,481 individuals responded to the survey and 1,365 completed it entirely.

©CIOL Bureau