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Windows Loses Ground With Developers
An anonymous reader notes that InfoWorld is covering a survey of North American developers that claims that Linux is gaining share as the number of developers targeting Windows fell 11 percent over the last year. Evans Data has been conducting these surveys of client, server, and Web developers since 1998. Evans Data says that the arrival of Windows Vista likely only kept the numbers from being even worse. The big gainer wasn't developing for a Web platform, but rather for Linux and "nontraditional client devices." Windows is still dominant, with 65% of developers writing code for this platform. Linux stands at almost 12%, up from 8% a year earlier. The article says that Evans Data collected information on Mac and Unix development but did not include them in this year's report.
It's not clear what is meant by the opening statement "Microsoft's Windows platform is losing traction" means.
If I am writing a web application that happens to run on IIS, am I really "targeting Microsoft Windows"? I don't think so - all I'm "targeting" a web browser running on a client machine, and I shouldn't know nor care what operating system, platform nor browser it has installed.
TFA doesn't seem to be making much of a point other than saying "we hate Microsoft, we think others do too, and therefore so should you".
By the same logic, the folks writing COBOL to run on big iron should have packed it in decades ago. Guess what? They're still around, and they're still going to be around.
Nice try, Redmond-bashers. You gotta come up with something better than that...
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
> Also, if you do your program right, you shouldn't need a lot of UI developers.
Is this how Linux apps are made? Go figure.
The killer app for Linux on the desktop is obviously going to be a GPL license arbitrator.