Report: Nearly Half of Open Source Developers Focusing on the Cloud

by Sam Dean - Jan. 20, 2009Comments (0)

Recently we covered open source infrastructure tools for cloud computing, which are on the rise. Providing another indication of convergence between open source and the cloud, Evans Data researchers are reporting today that nearly half of developers working on open source projects plan to offer applications as web services via cloud providers. The survey also found that Google App Engine and Amazon's services remain the most popular cloud infrastructure tools among these developers.

Evans Data's survey found that 40 percent of developers working on open source projects intend to offer applications as web services via cloud providers. That's a big shift in approach for open source application, and further evidence that the software-as-a-service model (SaaS) currently holds a lot of appeal. One among many reasons for the appeal may be that SaaS allows for pay-as-you-go usage models for commercial open source developers, where users may favor such models in the down economy.

In another recent report from Evans Data, John Andrews, President and CEO said:

"SaaS is delivering on the promise of rapid deployment, limited upfront investment in capital and staffing, plus a reduction in the software management responsibility all making SaaS a very desirable alternative to software on a user’s premise."

The survey found that cloud infrastructure services from IBM, Salesforce and others are lagging Google App Engine and Amazon's services, with about 29 percent of open source developers citing Google App Engine as their service of choice.

In addition, Evans Data found that MySQL remains the favorite among open source databases and that just over half of open source developers use Linux in a virtualized environment .The company's research involved over 360 open source developers, and clearly shows that we should expect many more cloud- and web service-centric applications from the open source arena.