Forked by Apple, yeah right
Linux’s 20th birthday was somewhat muted by the news that developers were less interested in the operating system.
According to recent results of the annual application development survey from researcher Evans Data, Linux has slipped to third place in popularity, behind Mac OS and Windows. Windows is still the one that everyone is writing for, but according to the figures OS X now the primary development platform of 7.9 per cent and only 5.6 per cent of developers use Linux.
On the face of it, it appears that developers have been looking at all the fanboys buying Mac gear and decided that they want a slice of the action. But on the whole that does not make much sense as they are both for different markets. Linux is mostly geared for serious business use, whereas OS X applications are mostly mobile toys for bored teenagers, Also the figures fail to mention Android which is not only Linux-based but is also running rings around OS X in the mobile market.
Things are also expected to change now that Linus Torvalds has officially announced that version 3.7 of the Linux kernel has gone stable. This means that developers have generic support for multiple ARM CPU architectures, reducing the amount of effort required to get Linux-based operating systems running on phones, tablets, and ARM-licensed developer boards like the Raspberry Pi.
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Nick Farrell
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