Survey: Emerging Market Developers Rush to Open-Source Software

A recent Evans Data Corp. survey shows that developers in emerging markets are increasingly hopping onto the open-source wave and including open-source software in the applications they build.

According to Evans Datas 2007 Emerging Markets Development Survey, which covers Brazil, Russia and Eastern Europe, India, and China, 69 percent of respondents said they are using open-source software, up from 59 percent six months ago.

Resource Library:

Officials at Evans Data, in Santa Cruz, Calif., said this increase corresponds with an increase in the use of the Eclipse open-source development platform in China and Brazil, as well as a continuing increase in the use of Linux in emerging markets.

In the last six months, adoption of Eclipse grew by 31 percent and 20 percent in India and Brazil, respectively, the survey showed.

Meanwhile, despite the increase in the use of Linux in emerging countries, 47 percent of Indian developers projected that they will be upgrading to Windows Vista as a primary or secondary host operating system next year, the Evans survey showed.

Moreover, the survey indicated that emerging market developers are moving to newer Web development models such as AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). Indeed, 36 percent of developers from emerging markets said they are using AJAX, up from 21 percent six months ago.

Based on the survey results, Russia and Eastern Europe appear to be leading the move to AJAX with an increase in adoption of 23 percent. Meanwhile, India increased its adoption of AJAX by 20 percent, and Brazil by 13 percent, the survey said.

"These adoption curves represent the enormous appetite of a development community looking at all key technologies to keep pace with the huge demand for IT enablement," said John Andrews, president of Evans Data, in a statement. "These markets continue to be a very demanding, but attractive opportunity for solution providers."

Check out eWEEK.coms for the latest news, reviews and analysis in programming environments and developer tools.