Eclipse Community Survey Shows Open Source Dev Trends

What platforms and tools are open source developers using in 2010? A new study from the Eclipse Foundation provides a few clues.

The Eclipse Foundation study compiled responses from 1,696 developers and provides insights into current open source development practices. Among the findings in the Eclipse report is that developers are increasingly turning to Linux as a platform for both deployment and development.

For the 2010 report, 32.7 percent of survey respondents reported that they used Linux as their development operating system. The 2010 figure is an increase over the 2009 study when 26.9 percent of respondents identified Linux as their development platform operating system of choice. Overall, Windows remains the top development platform in Eclipse's study at 58.3 percent, which is a decline from the 64.3 percent reported for 2009.

Among the respondents that use Linux for development, Ubuntu was the leading distribution at 18.3 percent followed by Fedora at only 4.7 percent. The increasing use of Linux by Eclipse developers isn't necessarily the result of a drive by Eclipse towards the Linux desktop.

"I actually think it is more a sign that Linux is gaining adoption on the desktop," Ian Skerrett, director of marketing at the Eclipse Foundation, told InternetNews.com. "Eclipse is improving the Linux tools experience, but I don't think this drives the decision on which operating system developers use on their desktop."

From a deployment perspective, Linux is the leader at 44 percent with Windows trailing at 39 percent. In terms of the Java application servers that developers are using, respondents identified Apache Tomcat as the leader at 33.8 percent, followed by JBoss at 10.5 percent and IBM Websphere at 5.1 percent.

Oracle's open source MySQL database was the primary database used by the Eclipse survey respondents, coming in at 31.8 percent. Oracle's namesake proprietary database was in second place at 21.6 percent. The Eclipse survey also found that Oracle database users were more likely to use Windows as their development desktop whereas MySQL users were more likely to use Linux.