Research and Markets has announced the addition of Open Source market forecast: Linux to their offering.

The report analyses and forecasts Linux software and service revenue opportunities in enterprises and public sector organisations, as well as among individual consumers. We look at both the server and client markets, but exclude the embedded Linux market.

The market for Linux products and services will grow from $2.4 bn in 2007 to $7.7 bn in 2012. Growth will slow down from 36 per cent in 2008 to 17 per cent in 2012. The revenue figures are small compared to other operating system (OS) markets, but the impact of Linux on other OSs will be much more significant than these figures would lead you to believe.

Linux service revenues will grow faster than Linux software revenues. Services will grow from 77 per cent to 81 per cent of the total Linux market between 2007 and 2012, as Linux use becomes more complex. The server market is the main segment of the overall Linux market. This segment accounts for 83 per cent of the market in 2007. However, by 2012, Linux's importance as a client OS will have grown and, as a result, server-based use of Linux software and services will reduce to 81 per cent of the overall market.

Over half of all North American developers use scripting languages according to Evans Data's newly released North American Development Survey, and that is breaking the long established pattern of using Windows as a development platform as well as a target.

While Windows dominates 3GL languages for both target and platform, far fewer developers using scripting languages are hosted on Windows and less than half of developers using PHP, Ruby or Perl are targeting the Windows Platform.

"The increasing adoption of developers using scripting languages correlates with today’s overall emphasis on web centric applications which have to be highly malleable to rapidly changing market driven requirements" said John Andrews, president and CEO of Evans Data.

He added, "Interestingly, while we see Linux continue to increase as a target platform, this category of development reflects the greatest growth in targeting a non windows target platform"

The survey found that scripting languages are used by 56 per cent of developers today, and while more than half of those developers use scripts less than 20 per cent of the time, both the total number of developers using scripting languages and the amount of time spent is expected to increase during the coming year. Linux was strong for both target and platform with PHP and Ruby users.

Other results of this in-depth survey of over 400 professional developers in North America conducted November 2007 include:

* Fifty-four percent of developers write multi-threaded applications - key for taking advantage of multi-core processors.

* The primary perceived obstacle to multi-core development is the complexity of parallel programming, followed by a lack of available tools

* Fifty-one percent of North American developers use agile development techniques some part of the time, and that percent is expected to increase next year.

Mozilla has released the Firefox 3 Beta 2 for download, solely for developers and testers.

Firefox 3 Beta 2 claims to include 900 improvements over the previous beta, such as fixes for- stability, performance and memory usage, and platform- and user interface- enhancements. Mozilla claims the improvements are based on community feedback received from the testing of beta 1 that was released in November.

The architect without the stonemason is not designing cathedrals, but castles in the air. —Gerald Weinberg
How important are software design skills to a programmer? Programmers, in the traditional, and perhaps most widespread, view of the software development process, are not themselves seen as designers but rather as people who implement the designs of other people. The job of the programmer, after all, is to write code. Code is viewed as a "construction" activity, and everyone knows you have to complete the design before beginning construction. The real design work is performed by specialized software designers. Designers create the designs and hand them off to programmers, who turn them into code according to the designer’s specifications. In this view, then, the programmer only needs enough design skills to understand the designs given to him. The programmer’s main job is to master the tools of her trade.

Only 6 percent of developers working on Open Source software have adopted GPLv3, according to Evans Data Corp’s recently released Open Source Software Development Survey.

Two-thirds say they will not be adopting GPLv3 anytime in the next year, and 43 percent say they will never implement the new license. In addition, almost twice as many would be less likely to join a project that implements GPLv3 than would be more likely to join.

"GPLv3 is controversial because it imposes restrictions on what you can do with programs implemented under this license," said John Andrews, president and CEO of Evans Data Corp.

He added, “Developers are confused and divided about those restrictions, with fairly equal numbers agreeing with the restrictions, disagreeing with them, or thinking they will be unenforceable.”

Other findings from this in-depth survey of over 380 developers working on Open Source projects, include:

• Lack of skills in an organization was the greatest barrier to a migration from Windows to Linux

• The Apache Foundation was identified as the organization having the best Open Source offerings
• A third of Open Source developers are developing desktop applications

GPLv3 also incorporates a clause to forbid licensees from bringing patent infringement suits, directly attacking the recent Novell-Microsoft alliance. Seventy percent of the developers in the survey felt that alliance had been bad for the Open Source community.