Microsoft: open source developers prefer CodePlex and GitHub

The results of the latest survey. GitHub and Subversion are the open source developers' favourites
Source: Microsoft

On its Developer Network, Microsoft occasionally calls on open source developers to participate in a small survey on the topic of "hosting platform and version control systems according to preferred development platform". The results of the latest survey have now been published on CodePlex.

More than 1,000 participants who develop on Windows, Mac OS X or Linux took part in the survey. In terms of code hosting, the survey found that the preferred systems were CodePlex (for Windows users) and GitHub (for Mac and Linux users). However, it should be noted that the current results only show a marginal difference of 0.1 per cent between GitHub and CodePlex for the Windows platform.

The developers seem to agree in terms of which version control system they use – according to the survey, all three user groups prefer Git, followed by Subversion (under Windows and Mac) and Mercurial (under Linux).

The survey concludes that Git and GitHub have become established de facto standards for Linux and Mac users. While these two systems also play a major role on Windows, equal market share on this platform is held by CodePlex (as the hosting service) and TFS, Mercurial and Subversion as version control systems. This means that the picture is significantly more heterogeneous under Windows than it is under Mac OS X and Linux.

(ehe)