Only One in Ten Linux Developers Said the SCO Lawsuit will Impact Adoption of Linux in Their Companies

SANTA CRUZ, CA, August 4, 2003 - A new survey of Linux developers has found that they are overwhelmingly unconcerned about the SCO lawsuit regarding the intellectual property rights of the core Unix code that sits at the center of Linux. Of more than 400 developers focused on Linux development more than 70% said that the SCO lawsuit will “probably not” or “absolutely not” impact their companies decision to use Linux, 12% said that the lawsuit will affect adoption plans and 17% had no opinion.

More than three quarters of developers who believe that Linux is ready for mission critical applications are not going to have their adoption plans impacted by the SCO lawsuit.

"Developers seem unimpressed with the SCO lawsuit, they are certainly not concerned enough to change their plans for Linux, since only one out of ten are considering it a factor in their adoption plans,” said Nicholas Petreley, Evans Data’s Linux analyst, “It is also interesting to note that KDE has taken a statistically significant lead in use and deployment after running neck and neck with GNOME for the past three years."

Other notable findings from the July 2003 survey:

• Linux users are finding it as easy to migrate their applications from Windows to Linux as from Unix to Linux. Within the first six months 45% of Unix application migrations to Linux have been completed and 47% of Windows application migrations have been completed.
• KDE is in use by 65% of survey respondents and GNOME is being used by 56% of respondents indicating that a good portion of developers use both desktop environments but KDE has moved ahead of GNOME for the first time.
• The playing field for Linux is far from decided with 36% of developers preferring commercial versions of Linux and 15% choosing a non-commercial version. The majority of developers, however, are undecided with 49% saying it doesn’t matter.

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.

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