Evans Data Corporation yesterday announced the results of its survey of North American developers and concluded that Windows is losing ground to Linux as a platform for application development. Windows targeting decreased by 12% in the last year, it's second year of decline. Linux, by comparison, gained 34% during the same time. Since it's the US independence day today (and Canada Day was July 1), I can't help b Evans Data Corporation yesterday announced the results of its survey of North American developers and concluded that Windows is losing ground to Linux as a platform for application development. Windows targeting decreased by 12% in the last year, it’s second year of decline. Linux, by comparison, gained 34% during the same time. Since it’s the US independence day today (and Canada Day was July 1), I can’t help but imagine millions of developers in North America celebrating their platform independence drinking cold beer, eating hotdogs and shooting off fireworks in celebration. Of course, relative percentages don’t tell the whole story. Windows is still a strong platform. There are still more developers targeting Windows (64.8%) than Linux (11.8%), but the trend is clearly moving away from Windows towards open source. Given Apple’s increase in market share in the last year, I wonder if the Mac is also having some impact on the scene. Personally, I think Windows is a good platform (I’m still on Windows XP) but I would not want to base a business on Windows alone. Let’s face it, there hasn’t been a Windows-focused company funded this century. All the startups are building web-based applications, so that means using the LAMP stack (Linux / Apache / MySQL / PHP) or in some cases FreeBSD. Similarly, if you’re in an IT organization and building in-house applications, most folks are building apps that can be accessed via web, since it’s much easier to deploy the applications over Intranet then having to insall software on hundreds or thousands of desktops. You can build web-based applications using Windows, but you pretty much have to buy into the whole Windows stack at that stage: Visual Studio, C# or VB.Net, IIS, SQL Server, etc. It’s a powerful combination, but it’s also locked into a single vendor. At MySQL, we’ve always felt Windows is an important platform and we continue to invest heavily in providing customers a good experience on Windows and with Visual Studio. But even without the Evans Data reeport, the trend towards Linux development has been obvious for at least a few years, especially if you look at programming language, web servers and tools usage. So I have to believe that the good folks in Redmond are as aware of this trend as everyone else in the industry. Hopefully Microsoft will help ensure better integration of open source and Windows. Otherwise, I think we’ll see Windows continue to shrink as a development platform. And that would be a shame. For more coverage on this story, checkout Slashdot, ZDNet and CNet. Open Source