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Interesting Trends from the Eclipse Community Survey 2010

Ian Skerrett recently posted the trends from the Eclipse Community Survey 2010.

What interests me?

“Linux continues to gain market share on the developer desktop”

“In 2007, 20% said Linux was their development operating system. Now, in 2010 almost a third (33%) say Linux.  The biggest loser seems to be Windows 73.8% in 2007 down to 58.3% in 2010.  Interestingly, Mac OS X has only gone from 3.5% to 7.9%.”

I expect this trend to continue with Windows losing a bit more share next year. On top of that, I would be really interested to see the segmented results of what open source developers use as their primary development operating system versus normal developers. I mean, I can’t be the only one who hasn’t noticed that any conference you go to that features a lot of open source developers… you tend to see a lot of shiny Macs. It’s almost scandalous given how closed Apple is with everything.

The other nice trend I like is regarding version control systems.

“Git usage up from 2.4% (2009) to 6.8% (2010). Mercurial usage also increased from 1.1% to 3%. This growth seems to be coming from the decreased use of CVS, 20% (2009) to 12.6% (2010). Subversion continues to be the most popular at 58.3%.”

I expect to see DVCS continue to rise next year when the tooling becomes better and people become more knowledgeable about their VCS options (if you been living in a centralized VCS world for a long time, making the jump to a DVCS takes some time). I think the trend of large open source communities (e.g., Eclipse) using or moving to a DVCS will help the trend toward DVCS dominance. This aligns nicely with one of my goals is to make sure Eclipse.org is running fully on Git soon.

I highly recommend taking a full read through the survey.