Open source developers ride the cloud

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Web services delivered via the cloud becoming popular option

By Paul Krill | San Francisco | Monday, 2 February, 2009

Nearly half of developers working on open source projects plan to offer applications as web services offerings using cloud providers, according to results of a new Evans Data open source development survey.

The survey found that 40% of developers are on this track. Of these developers, 29% plan to use Google App Engine while 15% intend to use Amazon services. Cloud services from other vendors, including IBM, Microsoft, and Salesforce, were not as popular, Evans says.

"As costs increase for power, staff, and datacentre resources, more businesses are being attracted to the latest promise: moving more of the company's infrastructure and applications into a third-party provided cloud," says John Andrews, president and CEO of Evans Data, in a statement released by the company. "Many companies are using this model to not only reduce infrastructure costs but simultaneously increase their computational capabilities."

For other channels, more open source applications — 30% — are distributed via OSS portals than any other way. But those who distribute applications through mobile application stores are the most likely to be making money, Evans says.

The survey of more than 360 open source developers conducted in November 2008 also found that 52% use Linux in a virtualised environment and that MySQL remains the open source database of choice, with more than half of developers using it in some of their projects.

Two-thirds of developers surveyed use a SQL database that is either commercial or open source and just 10% use a non-SQL relational database management system. One in five use the Flex programming language some of the time.