Report: The Cloud and Google App Engine Popular with Open Source Developers

The latest Evans Data Open Source Development survey indicates that 40 percent of developers working on Open Source projects plan on providing their applications as Web services offerings using Cloud providers.

 

Evans Data provides regularly updated IT industry market intelligence based on in-depth surveys of the global developer population. This survey of over 360 developers involved with open source development was conducted in November 2008.

 

Twenty-eight percent of the respondents, who plan to use the cloud, intend to use Google’s App Engine, while 15 percent plan to use Amazon’s services. Cloud services offered by companies such as Microsoft, IBM, and Salesforce are not nearly as popular as those of Google (News - Alert) and Amazon.

 

John Andrews, president and CEO of Evans Data explained that the increase in costs for power, staff and data center resources, are driving more businesses to move their infrastructure and applications into a third-party provided cloud.

 

A large number of companies are using this model to reduce infrastructure costs and simultaneously increase their computational capabilities.

 

Evans Data survey indicates that more open source applications are distributed through OSS portals (30 percent) than any other way. Companies who distribute their applications through mobile app stores are the most likely to be making money.

 

The research shows that just over half (52 percent) of the respondents use Linux in a virtualized environment; MySQL is still the open source database of choice as over half of developers reported using it in at least some of their projects. Two thirds of the respondents said that they use a SQL database, either open source or commercial, while only 10 percent of the respondents use a relational database management system. One in five said they use the Flex programming language at least some of the time.