“Occupying” spaces is a global phenomenon of 2011. Protesters refer to themselves as movements, not revolutions, and while their goals are quite diverse, their common ground is passion. Open Source echoes this decentralized kind of movement, and its passion.
We know that an overwhelming majority of developers use open source, so one might expect that they’d prefer using software tools that are open source as well.
Klint Finley, a Senior Writer at SiliconAngle, recently posted the results of a developer survey from BestVendor on his blog, which alludes to this very assumption. I looked at what percent of the tools used are open source tools (by category), and there were some surprising results:
While no category reached 100% penetration of open source tools, version control systems came close at 90%. The ease of installing and using these tools, and the available services seem to drive their popularity, with Git leading the way.
Open source databases also have a large share at 74% of that category’s total, perhaps because the gap between free and paid is so large. Open source IDEs come in at 57%. I thought Microsoft Visual Studio would represent a large share of non-open source, but surprisingly, it wasn’t even ranked in the top 5, and Xcode for Apple Mac, iPhone and iPad was the leading non-open source IDE with 10%.
At the other extreme, bug tracking showed the lowest share of open source tools, representing 23% of the total. That honor of top bug tracking tool goes to Jira, which is a very low-cost tool from Atlassian. Why don’t open source bug tracking tools have larger share? I asked a few of our developers at Black Duck, and a common theme was that they just aren’t as good.
Where great open source tools exist, they dominate their category. Tools like IDEs and frameworks are connected with their deployment environments so tools for proprietary environments will tend to be proprietary which explains their lower share.
One caveat: the survey, which had over 500 respondents, represented developers from small companies with less than 100 developers, which, given the number of developers in large enterprises, must skew the results. I’d be interested to see a similar survey of developers in larger companies. How do you think the results would change?
Hi,
As a developer for one of the open source bug trackers mentioned in the survey ( MantisBT – http://www.mantisbt.org/ ) I’d love to hear where you think our product falls short when compared Jira or other commercial products.
Feel free to reply to this post or email me directly.
Robert
Robert, thanks for your comment. I wish I had something more substantive to offer than the anecdotal feedback from some of our developers about why Jira ranked high vs MantisBT and the other open source bug tools. MantisBT has 8% share which is very good. Another explanation for Jira’s share might be that Atlassian benefits from a lot of viral/online communications , but they also advertise – I noticed a Jira advert on the MantisBT site. Also the survey didn’t report on trends – it could be that open source tools are gaining in share.
Very interesting.
I would of agreed that since the majority of developers use open source, you’d expect that open source would be the way to go for software tools as well.
I’ve used Mantis previously and it was great. Since it’s highly customizable, we modified to implement scrum using Mantis.