Eclipse study shows more gains but some problems
The annual Eclipse survey of open source developers is out, and it says the trends toward open source, away from Microsoft, are holding firm.
(The illustration is from the Eclipse report, and explained below.)
As CNET's Dave Rosenberg notes, Ubuntu and the Apache Tomcat application server are among the big winners, but what's most impressive is to look at how the trends have changed the market environment over time.
Linux.Com is over the moon over the results, with Jennifer Cloer writing it supports other findings of Linux' growing popularity among developers, especially young developers.
In 2007 20% of developers used Linux on their developer desktops, against 74% using Windows. Now Linux is up to 33%, Windows is down to 58%. Windows is falling more quickly than Linux is rising.
While the survey was written in English, about 40% of respondents were from either Germany or France, Eclipse said. Half the respondents were line programmers,
One-fourth don't use a formal process methodology. Most use Subversion for source code management, and half use the Ant build management tool. Server-centric and rich Internet applications now represent over half the work, and mySQL is the most popular database, although even among this group one-in-five use Oracle.
The most disquieting finding, highlighted in the graph close-up above, is that there has been a halt in the momentum toward contributing code back to the community. The percentage of developers contributing back is down, and the percentage who don't interact with the broader community is up.
Theories?