Interesting Stats From Developer Technographics Survey

After parsing through a couple of Information Week articles (here and here) covering select results from the Forrester-Dr. Dobb’s Developer Technographics Survey, some interesting stats stood out to me.

  • The #1 motivating factor for developers that contribute to open source software is that it's "fun to solve problems" (62%), with the next closest being "sense of accomplishment".
  • Only 9% of developers that contribute to open source projects are paid to do so.
  • The top reason given for using open source is to accelerate projects. Cost is a close second, but it's second.
  • Silverlight adoption went up, from 10% in 2009 to 18%. I didn't see that coming, but Microsoft's change in strategy on Silverlight will likely reverse that trend. ASP.NET usage for RIA's went down from 39% to 29%. I didn't see that coming either.
  • Only 8% report using HTML5, but 52% intend to start in the next year or so.
  • 4/5 developers use some open source software for application development or deployment.
  • Use of open source operating systems by developers (primarily Linux) grew from 48% in 2009 to 61%. Those percentages sound high to me, but I think the general trend is correct.