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.