The results of the Eclipse Community Survey for 2013 are now available. This is the sixth edition of the survey so it presents a nice snapshot of the changes that are happening in the Eclipse community and the wider developer community. A complete report that summarizes the results are available and as always we published the detailed data [ods] [xlsx] so you can do your own analysis.
Each year, there are a number of interesting trends that seem to emerge from the results. Here are some highlights from the 2013 survey:
1. Git continues to take-over. The adoption of Git as a developers primary source code management system continues to move forward and at the expense of Subversion. Interestingly, Subversion continues to be the #1 SCM but just barely. If you combine Git and GitHub usage, Subversion leads by only 1.5% points. Next year I am sure Git and GitHub will be #1.
2. Decline of Ant usage. For Build and Release Management tools, there was a significant drop in the usage of Ant. Only 38.8% on the respondents claim to use Ant compared to 50.8% in 2012.
3. Regional differences for cloud computing. This year we had a large number of respondents from Germany. This allowed us to identify some regional differences in the responses. One of the most significant diffrences were plans for cloud computing. Overall, 47% of respondents had no plans for deploying applications to the cloud, compared to 59.5% in Germany. For those that were deploying applicaitons to the cloud, Germans top preference was to deploy to a private cloud (35%) compared to the overall respondents preference of deploying to Amazon (30.8%).
4. Perceptions of Web-based IDE. For the first time this year we asked about people’s experiences with web-based IDEs. Projects like Orion are investing and innovating in this new style of IDE so I thought it would be interesting to understand current perceptions. A large majority (72%) stated they had no interest in a web-based IDE or needed more information to form an opinion. It is certainly early days for web-based IDEs but I think these results show that there is a lot of education and evangelism needed to change developer’s perception of web-based IDEs.
5. Most respected companies in open source. This year we asked respondents to list which companies they respected for their open source contribution and participation. This was a write-in question so respondents could write-in multiple company names and were not picking from a list.
The top 3 most respected companies for their open source contributions and participation are Google, RedHat/JBoss and IBM. Congratulations to all 3 companies, a well deserved recognition for the support they provide to the open source community.
6. Adoption of new Eclipse releases. For the first time this year there was a noticeable decrease in the adoption of the latest Eclipse release, Eclipse 4.2. In past survey results, 75%+ of the respondents would report they were using the most recent release of Eclipse, for example in 2012 76.9% were using Eclipse 3.7 (Indigo). This year only 56% reported to be using Eclipse 4.2 (Juno) and an additional 12.9% using Eclipse 3.8. The slow down in adoption is most likely the result of the performance issues found in Eclipse 4.2.
At the same time, there was a significant drop in the overall satisfaction with Eclipse. Respondents indicating they were very satisfied or satisfied dropped from 90% in 2012 to 81% in 2013. Not very good news and hopefully something that will be addressed as the Eclipse 4.x platform continues to mature.
Thank you to everyone that participated in the survey. We certainly appreciate you taking the time to provide your feedback.
Ian Skerrett 