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Date: Wednesday, September 27, 2006
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A recent poll undertaken by Methods & Tools magazine revealed that there is no easy answer to whether or not the quality of open source software development tools is comparable to commercial ones.

Methods & Tools, which provides practical knowledge and information on all topics of software development and software engineering, conducted the poll in August 2006.

More and more developers are using development tools produced by the open source community like MySQL, Eclipse, PHP or JBoss. The August poll examined how the quality of open source tools is perceived against their commercial competitors.

A similar one was conducted in 2004.

For many participants in the poll, there was no difference in perceived quality between open source and commercial tools for software development.

From the results, 22% of the participants indicated that it was difficult to give a precise answer. Diversity exists in both worlds and it is not easy to give a clear indication when you have experiences giving opposite indications.

About 38% of the respondents said the perceive the same quality between the two categories (32% in 2004), while 22% indicated "there is no easy answer to the question" (24% in 2004).

One out of five (20%) said open source was superior, versus 12% who said it was inferior, to commercial. In 2004, 26% said open source was superior, against 13% who said it was inferior.

Things have not changed a lot since a similar 2004 poll, even if the usage of open source tools has surely increased in the mainstream development shop.

This may be a reason of the 6% decline in percentage in the "OS software is better than commercial" category, as open source has been more used and could revealed some limits.

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