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UK developers prefer open source
A STUDY of UK developers indicates that most prefer to use open source technologies.
IT market research agency, Kingpin Intelligence, asked 200 developers using Open Source and 200 that use alternatives, about the choices they make.
Results indicate that most non-Open Source respondents would prefer to use Open Source for work, but agree that existing licences and client requirement hamper migration.
While 42 per cent of all those surveyed believe that the LAMP stack currently poses a threat to other technologies, 42 per cent don’t feel that Open Source necessarily equals higher quality. However, the majority of respondents still prefer to use the Mozilla browser for personal use, with Internet Explorer more widely used at work.
Red Hat is widely seen as the leading Open Source vendor, with younger rival Ubuntu making strides in vendor space.
“This research confirms that there is increasing interest in Open Source technologies in the UK developer community,” said Claire Roy, Head of Research at Kingpin Intelligence. “The cost and flexibility benefits of using Open Source technologies are appealing for developers and organisations in the current financial climate.” µ
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How can developers form a judgement on open source software when many have little or no experience of it, let alone its quality.
In my aerospace company, despite having several (10+) experienced programmers, none have any knowledge of php, and most of them had never heard of regex. Another equated free with rubbish, despite the open source tool I recommended having a unix pedigree.
The reason open source is inherently better, is that its development infrastructure is set up to encourage dialogue between the author and users, ie bug reporting is actively encouraged so defects can be quickly rectified. Commercial companies rarely encourage this interaction with their customers (although they're happy to take their money), and almost never publish a list of outstanding bugs.
--[The reason open source is inherently better, is that its development infrastructure is set up to encourage dialogue between the author and users,]--

Normally the author either doesn't answer e-mails or tells you it's a problem with "your selection of installed libraries", or says something like "It's really Simple: all you do is recompile X, Y, Z and the Linux kernel, but be sure to rewrite them first to make my software work."