As I read the Eclipse responses to the 2011 survey one thing that really stood out was the activity (or lack there of) in the number of respondents. The US continues to be second or third in the past two years with regards to number of respondents (maybe we are just lazy). I also would have thought, from a site which claims over a million hits per month that there would have been more than 624 people taking the survey. The survey count dropped from 1696 respondents in 2010 to just 624 in 2011 – I don’t think that’s a good thing for an open source community.

We believe a reason for the lower number of respondents is that some popular developer news sites in Germany and France had previously promoted the survey but did not promote the survey this year. This is evident by the decreased participation rate
in Germany (26% in 2010 vs 18% in 2011) and France (15% in 2010 vs 7% in 2011).

This year, the playing field seem to be leveled between Germany, France, and the United States with regards to survey respondents. But, as stated, the lack of promotion may be the cause. The US was at 16.8%, Germany reigns at 18.1% and France took a beating with only 6.9% of the respondents and India gained some ground to 5.6% – up 1.6% from last year.

Based on geographical area, Europe represented 58.9% of the respondents, North America 21.6%, and Asia 14.3%.

I also found it interesting that JQuery continues to win the popularity vote amongst developers for RIA frameworks:

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And a real shocker is the number of developers choosing Windows over the other platforms this year: