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.