Developers slowly realise that they are being bamboozled and exploited by Apple; Microsoft treats developers similarly, but it incentivises for defection away from GNU/Linux

Back in 2009, I did some analysis of the number of developers per country. Apparently, some people at DebConf remember this and asked if I could update this data. So, here we are with the 2010 version, sorted by the ratio of *active* developers per million population for each country.

I propose that Product Management should take a more active role in FOSS, not telling the developers what users need, but teamingwith developers to identify the target audience and prioritize the users needs. If developers can donate their time working on these projects there is no reason Product Managers can’t do the same thing.

According to market research, open-source developers rate software quality for their tools more harshly than do developers who specialize in proprietary solutions. Esther Schindler contemplates possible explanations.

One still occasionally hears people wonder why free and open source software developers "work for free." We aren't talking about developers that work at a company or university.

Chatting to Steve Raby, UK country manager for open source ECM vendor Nuxeo yesterday, an interesting point was raised around the issue of motivation of open source developers versus developers on proprietary poducts, and hiring them.

The Groovy-Eclipse developers have delivered version 2.0 of the plugin for developers who want to work with Groovy and Java in the Eclipse IDE. The new version is the culmination of work which began in May 2009 to create a more integrated, incremental compilation process. This has resulted in what the developers call an "almost completely rewritten" plugin.

Forrester Research advises its clients who are considering open source tools to examine the so-called ecosystem around a particular product -- the pool of developers, forums, paid support and commercial versions -- to determine if there's enough support available. It notes that if an open source project has, say, 700 developers and a good ecosystem, then it's a better risk than a proprietary product from 20-person startup.

The open source PHP dynamic language is one of the most widely deployed languages on Web servers today. But what operating systems are PHP developers using to develop and deploy their applications? It's a question that has been asked before and now it's being answered with a new study from Zend, one of the lead commercial backers behind PHP.