An Evans Data survey released Dec. 2 showed that developers in the Asia
Pacific market are embracing free developer programs more than ever.
Evans Data's Asia Pacific Development Survey shows that developer
participation on developer programs has risen by almost 10 percent in 2009,
with developers opting into free programs at a rate of more than two-and-a-half
times that of paid programs.
In this latest survey of over 400 developers in the Asia Pacific region,
conducted in October, half of the developers were in a program, with 28 percent
in a free program and 12 percent in a paid program while an additional 11
percent were in both free and paid programs, Evans Data officials said.
"With the resources available today through free and open organizations
and even through social networking sites, it's getting to be very difficult to
charge for developer program membership," Janel Garvin, CEO
of Evans Data, said in a statement. "Paid programs need to supply
considerably more value through support and resources than they did in the past
in order to recruit and retain developers."
The survey was part of a global series of development reports Evans Data
conducts twice yearly throughout the world that cover topics such as programming
language and platform use, Web services and SOA (service-oriented
architecture), cloud computing, high-performance computing, development tools
and methodologies.
Another highlight from the report was that Asia Pacific developers are the
youngest of any region, with two-thirds being under the age of 30. Also, 85
percent of the survey respondents said they work in companies that have geographically
distributed teams. Win32, Java Server Faces and Apache Struts are the three
most used development frameworks, having equal market share, Evans Data
officials said.
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