SANTA CRUZ, CA, March 1, 2004 - More than 90% of Linux developers don’t believe the SCO/Linux lawsuit has any merit, according to the Spring 2004 Linux Development Survey from Evans Data Corporation. Three percent "absolutely" believe the lawsuit has merit, a further 5% think it "probably" has merit but more than half answered "absolutely not".

Nearly 60% of respondents' companies have evaluated the intellectual property risks of Linux but only 13% indicated the lawsuit would either "absolutely" or "probably" impact their company's adoption of Linux. Two in five developers believe Linux distributors should offer guarantees against the potential impact of the lawsuit. However, even if SCO does win the lawsuit, almost two thirds of developers think it will have only a minor effect on Linux development.

"Most people realize that, by demanding license fees, SCO wants the benefit of a court decision without actually trying the case, which is why their rants are met with jeers instead of fear," said Nicholas Petreley, Evans' Linux analyst. "Also, Java is having a breakout year in Linux development. The open-source Java-based Eclipse development environment has shown astonishing growth in the past few years, and Java-based NetBeans isn't far behind."

Other findings from the February 2004 survey of more than 400 Linux developers:

• Eclipse use has grown by 80% in the last year and is the most used IDE by Linux developers. The Java-based IDE has a large number of plug-ins allowing development of just about any application type.
• Linux developers improve their most important tools so that the most critical tools are rated as excellent with a few exceptions like source code management, error detection and debuggers where the satisfaction levels of the tools are out of step with their importance.
• More than 80 percent of developers think that Linux should be standardized beyond the kernel, 42% saying its "very important" and 2% of developers it was "not at all important".

Evans Data Corporation provides regularly updated IT industry market intelligence based on in-depth surveys of the global developer population. Evans' syndicated research includes surveys focused on developers in a wide variety of subjects.

Copyright 2007 Evans Data Corporation. All other company names, products and services mentioned in this document are the trademarks and property of their respective owners.

###